Comparative analysis of SDN and conventional networks using routing protocols

Conventional routing protocols such as RIP, OSPF, EIGRP and BGP have a very rigid and intricate system thus narrowing the adaptability of networks to the ever changing Internet. The emergence of Software Defined Networking (SDN) provides a solution for this problem. Due to the handiness of a centralized controller, SDN has provided an effective method in terms of routing computation and fine control over data packets. Due to the increase in unpredicted failures taking place the ability to predict/know the approximate maximum time it takes for these networks to converge in order to avoid and/or minimize loss of packets/data during these failures has become crucial in today's world. This time that the routers in the network take to converge via the implemented routing protocol and resume communication or transfer of information is called the routing convergence time. In this work, the performance is measured using routing convergence time during link failure with respect to the topology scale to show that SDN routing/forwarding is better compared to conventional routing. Further the results indicate that the routing convergence time is less in SDN networks on comparison with conventional networks when the topology scale is increased, indicating that SDN networks converge faster in comparison with Conventional networks and that routing convergence time is greatly influenced with the changing topological size.