Performance evaluation of software-defined networking controllers in wired and wireless networks

Abstract

Traditional networking solutions are unable to meet modern computing needs due to the expanding popularity of the internet, which requires increased agility and flexibility. To meet these objectives, software-defined networking (SDN) arises. A controller is a major element that will determine if SDN succeeds or fails. Various current SDN controllers in many sectors must be evaluated and compared. The performance of two well-known SDN controllers, POX and Ryu, is evaluated in this research. We used the Mininet-WiFi emulator to implement our work and the distributed internet traffic generator (D-ITG) to assess the aforementioned controllers using delay, jitter, packet loss, and throughput metrics. What is new in our research is the study of network performance in two different types of transmission media: wired and wireless. The speed of the wired medium was chosen to be fast ethernet, which was not previously studied. In addition, the size of the packet was varied among 128, 256, 512, and 1,024 bytes. The comparison was performed on three topologies (single, linear, and tree). The experimental results showed that Ryu offers significantly lower latency, jitter, and packet loss than POX in most scenarios. Also, the Ryu controller has higher throughput than POX, especially on wireless networks.