Performance evaluation of OpenFlow in commodity wireless routers

Abstract

Software-Defined Networking technologies are rapidly reaching wireless environments and a number of questions arise regarding its efficiency in such scenarios. This work evaluates the OpenFlow performance in scenarios with based commodity wireless router running an Open vSwitch (OVS) Linux kernel module and different SDN controllers. A set of client hosts connected at the commodity wireless router sends data to a sink server host. We collected key performance metrics, such as throughput, delay, jitter, and packets loss, to evaluate the efficiency of using a commodity wireless router in a SDN context. Results show some bottleneck when using UDP protocol in high rates. These results suggest that a commodity wireless router can be only deployed in reduced size networks, as homes and small to medium organizations, contributing to accelerate the pace of SDN adoption based on use of legacy network devices.