A Comparative and Analytical Study for Choosing the Best Suited SDN Network Operating System for Cloud Data Center

The growing deployment of Software Defined Network (SDN) paradigm in the academic and commercial sectors resulted in many different Network Operating Systems (NOS). As a result, adopting the right NOS requires an analytical study of the available alternatives according to the target use case. This study aims to determine the best NOS according to the requirements of Cloud Data Center (CDC). This paper evaluates the specifications of the most common open-source NOSs. The studied features have been classified into two groups, i.e., non-functional features such as availability, scalability, ease of use, maturity, security and interoperability, and functional features, such as virtualization, fault verification and troubleshooting, packet forwarding techniques and traffic protection solutions. A Decision support system, Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) has been applied for assessing specifications of the inspected NOSs, namely, ONOS, Opendaylight (ODL), Floodlight, Ryu, POX and Tungsten. Our investigation revealed that ODL is the most suitable NOS for CDC compared to the rest studied NOSs. However, ODL and ONOS have almost similar scores compared to the rest NOSs.