Performance Analysis of OpenFlow in a Multi-Interface WMN Testbed

Abstract

In the near future, a significant increase of new services is estimated due to the advent of several heterogeneous devices connected to the Internet, with the capacity to exchange information, collect data and interact with the environment. Therefore, robust network infrastructures will be required to make these services available. The adoption of the Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) fits in this context, opening up space for new features that optimize the network data flow, such as traffic engineering, flow-based packet forwarding, and interoperability. In this work, a performance analysis of OpenFlow is performed in a multi-interface WMN testbed. Among the experiments, we highlight the impact of heterogeneous mesh routers on the OpenFlow performance in single-channel and multi-channel scenarios, as well as the comparison of OpenFlow with three traditional WMN routing protocols: B.A.T.M.A.N., AODV, and HWMP. The results show a better performance of the OpenFlow in scenarios with homogeneous multi-channel routers in terms of throughput, delivery rate, jitter, and number of lost packets. In addition, the paper introduces problems related to the high overhead of OpenFlow in scenarios with multiple flows, as well as some directions to solve them.