Comparative Analysis of UDP Traffic With and Without SDN-Based Firewall

Abstract

To address prevalent challenges such as scalability, flexibility, manageability in traditional networking architecture, a new network architecture, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged. With the help of SDN, the designed network becomes centrally programmable aiding efficient communication between control plane and data plane. However, the communication between control plane and data plane adds roundtrip time (RTT) delay, which results in packet loss. In this paper, packet delivery ratio of User Datagram Protocol (UDP) traffic after delivery has been studied for different bandwidths ranging from 1 Mbit/sec to 50 Mbits/sec in SDN environment designed with and without firewall topology respectively. The objective was to analyze the performance of SDN based firewall installed in POX controller. It is observed, the topology designed with firewall has higher average percentage of packet loss- 0.202%, 0.472%, 1.17%, 1.36%, 0.932%, 1.3%, 0.862% than the topology designed without firewall- 0.156%, 0.05%, 0.072%, 0.224%, 0.134%, 0.068%, 0.036% for bandwidths ranging 1 Mbit/sec to 50 Mbits/sec respectively. Average percentage of packet loss is observed to be increasing in general with increase in bandwidth. For bandwidth, upwards of 10 Mbits/sec, almost equal and minimal jitter is observed as well. The topologies with and without firewall are emulated using POX controller (an open source development platform for Python-based SDN control applications) in Mininet which work on virtual machine created by VirtualBox.