Stateful firewall‐enabled software‐defined network with distributed controllers: A network performance study

Abstract

SummarySummarySoftware‐defined network (SDN) is constructed by decoupling the control and data plane from the forwarding devices. The control plane operations are managed by centralized or distributed controllers, and the data plane operation is managed by respective forwarding devices. SDN provides an easy and efficient management solutions for software‐programmed consolidated middlebox in virtual machines. Additionally, SDN with centralized controller faces complications like scalability, network bottle neck, and single point failure. In this study, a stateful inspection firewall acts as a middlebox in distributed SDN‐controlled network. The controller is programmed with a failure detection and recovery mechanism to provide reliability and redundancy and enhance the overall performance of the network. The objective of stateful firewall on SDN architecture is to secure the network by monitoring the current connections and maintain its state information until the connection is active. In this paper, the performance of firewall‐enabled SDN with centralized and distributed controllers are measured, compared, and analyzed. The experiments are done using POX controller, and the results are verified by Mininet network emulation tool. The results show that the stateful firewall‐enabled SDN with distributed controller network improves the security, reliability, availability, and overall performance of the network. In the proposed SDN, average network throughput is improved by 43%, average network delay is reduced by 4%, average channel utilization is increased by 40%, average network overhead is reduced by 26%, and average network response time is reduced by 23%.