Performance Evaluation of SDN Controllers: FloodLight, POX and NOX

Mohamed Eltaj, Ahmed Hassan M. Hassan

SDN, OpenFlow, Floodlight, POX, NOX.

Networking technologies achieved an enormous jump toward an appealing notion, known as software-defined networking (SDN). to the best of our knowledge, there has been no comprehensive compression discussion about floodlight, POX and NOX controller in the literature. the aim of this research is to evaluate different types of a controller according to various parameters such as average TCP/UDP throughput, average bandwidth, packet loss, latency, topology discovery time and prediction inspection. we did a series of simulation studies in the mininet framework. it was found that the floodlight controller shows best performance (throughput) in a tree topology with congestion window size 32 mb, and a poor performance in linear and custom topologies, this result motivates extra experiments to investigate floodlight, we test the controller with different congestion window sizes 2, 20 and 32 mb, best performance recorded for 2 mb window size in a linear topology. POX and NOX controllers record best throughput results than floodlight, in all topologies, especially POX controller which scored best throughput in a custom topology. in UDP bandwidth investigation POX and NOX performed better with higher bandwidth utilization, while floodlight shows modest performance in return. lost packet tests, reveal that the highest rate of lost packets was recorded by floodlight with a significant difference between all tested controllers. latency test concluded with performance capabilities for responding to messages_in, POX controller scored best result with highest response per milliseconds. topology discovery time results shows that floodlight controller is the fastest in all topologies, especially in tree topology. the prediction of controller succeeded with POX controller in a throughput test, which reflects stability in a controller performance, unlike latency prediction which failed against POX.

https://dx.doi.org/10.31873/IJEAS.7.08.01