OSPF routing protocol performance in Software Defined Networks

Software Defined networks (SDNs) paradigm tries to improve the network performance, facilitating the network management and the scalability basing on open-source software and adding a new entity called controller that manages the entire network. One of the goals of the controller is taking decisions in regards to routing instead of distributing it among the network nodes, as usual. However, this field inside SDN needs more work because it is not clearly defined how the traditional routing protocols will work over a SDN. Thus, in this paper, we analyze how a dynamic routing protocol as Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) works in a SDN. The study analyzes the stability of network through parameters as convergence time and round trip time (RTT) and the quality of service (QoS) when a video is streamed between end devices. The results have been compared with a traditional network in order to evaluate the similarity in terms of stability and performance. Results show that, despite the proposal uses an OSPF implementation that does not have a performance as good as the traditional solution in terms of convergence time, with the SDN proposed we get better performance in terms of Quality of Service.