Experimental evaluation of two OpenFlow controllers

Abstract

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) can help simplify the management of today's complex networks and data centers. SDN provides a comprehensive view of the network, offering flexibility and easing automation. In SDN, traffic management functionality requires a high-performance and responsive controller. In this paper, we conduct an experimental evaluation of two open-source distributed OpenFlow controllers, namely ONOS and OpenDaylight. Specifically, we construct a testbed and use a standard benchmarking tool called Cbench to evaluate their performance. We benchmark the throughput, latency, and thread scalability of these two controllers in both physical and virtualized (OpenStack) environments. The experimental results show that ONOS provides higher throughput and lower latency than OpenDaylight, which suffers from performance problems on larger network models. Additional experiments demonstrate the effects of thread placement on the performance of these two controllers.