Performance Analysis of an OpenFlow-Enabled Network with POX, Ryu, and ODL Controllers

With the ongoing digital transformation, the requirement for seamless & agile network connectivity has increased. This has necessitated the transformation from traditional networking to Software-Defined Network. With SDN, the network resources/infrastructure can be made more robust and programmable to accommodate the varying demand. Software-Defined Network (SDN) is now being used by data centers, cloud computing environments, and service providers for efficient handling of network requests. The objective of SDN can be achieved through the performance of the controllers. We have considered POX, Ryu, and ODL controllers to evaluate the performance using the Mininet tool and D-ITG (Distributed Internet Traffic Generator) script. Performance is evaluated using custom topology i.e. Fat tree topology. Several performance metrics (such as Delay, Jitter, Bitrate, Packet rate, Loss-burst size, and Percentage of Packets dropped) are considered and the behaviors of the controllers are monitored during experimentation by flooding the switches with several data packets. It has been observed that the POX controller performs better compared to Ryu and ODL for the Fat tree topology. From the experimental results, it is observed that the average delay of ODL is approximately 50% more than the POX controller and approximately 80% more delay occurred in the Ryu controller in comparison to the POX controller. Similarly average packet dropped percentage of POX is 20% less than Ryu and ODL controllers. Also, it has been observed that the average jitter in POX is almost 50% less in comparison to ODL and 90% less in comparison to the Ryu controller.