Performance Evaluation of Stateful Firewall-Enabled SDN with Flow-Based Scheduling for Distributed Controllers

Abstract

Software-defined networking (SDN) is a network approach achieved by decoupling of the control and data planes. The control plane is logically centralized and the data plane is distributed across the network elements. The real-time network is in need of the incorporation of distributed controllers to maintain distributed state information of the traffic flows. Software-based solutions aid distributed SDN controllers to handle fluctuating network traffic and the controller’s configurations are dynamically programmed in real time. In this study, SDN controllers were programmed with a stateful firewall application to provide firewall functionalities without the support of committed hardware. A stateful firewall filtered traffic based on the complete context of incoming packets; it continuously evaluated the entire context of traffic flows, looking for network entry rather than specific traffic flows. In addition, a flow-based scheduling module was implemented in the distributed controllers to improve network scalability. A network cluster was configured with three distributed controllers and we experimented with three independent network topologies. The performance of the proposed network model was evaluated by measuring and analyzing metrics such as network throughput (kbps), delay (ms) and network overhead (pkt/ms) for various combinations of controllers and topologies. The results of the analysis were determined using the mininet emulator. The findings of the performance evaluation indicate that the distributed SDN controllers performs better than a centralized controller. When comparing distributed SDN with two controllers and distributed SDN with three controllers the overall network throughput is increased by 64%, the delay is decreased by 43% and network overhead is reduced by 39%.