Benchmarking the ONOS Controller with OFCProbe

The increased popularity of Software Defined Networking (SDN) drives the development and research of all involved components. In particular, state-of-the-art SDN controllers are a central part of the resulting network architecture and have a large impact on the performance of the entire network. Hence, it is necessary to quantify various performance indicators of the SDN controller in order to assess its feasibility in the context of different network characteristics such as topology and network size w.r.t. the number of nodes and links. To this end, we extend the open-source controller benchmarking tool OFCProbe with several novel modules that are capable of recording relevant performance metrics and demonstrate their use in the context of benchmarking the ONOS controller. Furthermore, we investigate the impact of different types of topology characteristics on the performance of the controller. In this work, we focus on several performance indicators for SDN controllers. First, the time that the ONOS controller needs to discover the network topology and update its internal representation of the topology. Second, we investigate the duration of the installation of flow rules that are used for reactive path provisioning. Finally, we measure the response time of the controller when dealing with asynchronous messages.