Performance Evaluation and Comparison of Software Defined Networks Controllers

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a new network architecture, the controller which is one of its components represents the intelligent part of it. Today, there exists many SDN controllers including: Beacon, Floodlight, Iris, Libfluid, Maestro, NOX, ONOS, and others. The question is which controller can perform better in which situations. Several works were done to compare these controllers with respect to efficiency, controllers’ features, and architecture. Because of the controller importance in the SDN architecture, it should be given a proper attention to any proposal or design. In this paper, a Performance evaluation test of five controllers (libfluid, ONOS, OpenDaylight, POX and Ryu) is done in terms of End to End throughput and End to End delay by using Iperf and Ping commands. The test is done using linear topology that is built in Mininet emulator, with different number of switches. This paper introduces a new contribution in measuring the ability of the five controllers to give a throughput and delay responses while increasing the load on the linear topology and at what point of network load (number of switches) the controllers stop responding. Even though the results show that libfluid gives the best throughput performance and POX gives the best delay performance, the selection of the best performing controller should be based on several criteria, per the user requirements.