Evaluation of the robustness of SDN controllers ONOS and ODL

Software-defined networking relies on a controller as its main element. Therefore, it is critical for the controller to present features that improve the overall network performance while ensuring continuity of service despite failures. OpenDayLight (ODL) and Open Network Operating System (ONOS) are two important open-source distributed controllers. The objective of this study is to evaluate how ODL and ONOS deal with different failure scenarios in both their data and control planes. In the data plane, the evaluation analyzes both link and switch failures and recovers, different flows in reactive and proactive modes. In the distributed control plane throughput and latency are considered when the number of switches and controllers increase, the time to synchronize the network operations among the controllers, the time for a master to recover from failure, and whether network operations are reinstalled after the failure of a master controller. Our evaluation shows that ONOS achieves better results than ODL in the data plane, and ODL surpasses ONOS in the experiments performed in the control plane.