Network parameters effects on system resources in software defined networks

Abstract

Software Defined Networking (SDN), often referred to as a revolutionary rather than an evolutionary new idea in networking, promises to dramatically simplify network control, management, and enable innovation through network programmability. SDN has shown great potential to simplify the existing complex, inflexible, and costly network architecture and infrastructure through the reshaping of conventional network functions and design of the protocols. To achieve this goal, OpenFlow protocol has been proposed and is considered the most widely deployed protocol in the field of SDN technology. Mininet emulator provides an efficient virtualization method to design and study the SDN concepts with different types of software switches and controllers. In this research, an extensive study about the effects of changing the size and type of network topology that is constructed in Mininet's virtualization environment presented, in addition to the effects of the types of SDN switches and controllers used to build the network on the amount of resources that must be provided by the operating system. The results showed that there are differences in performance for the controllers and switches, where the OVS controller utilized the higher processing power for Open vSwitch than that of User-Space switches. The later type of switches consumed vast amount of system memory during the construction of large size topologies. The use of Open vSwitch also, resulted in more setupteardown time, which was almost twice that of User-Space switches in large size topologies.