Comparative Analysis of Software Defined Networking (SDN) Controllers - In Terms of Traffic Handling Capabilities

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging paradigm that allows network operators to have more control of their infrastructure. Control is achieved by decoupling control and data plane of the network. Controller is the place where all the intelligence of SDN resides; hence it is important to test the capabilities of the controller before deploying it in production networks. This paper presents an analysis of the capabilities of two open-source python based OpenFlow SDN controllers (POX and RYU). The analyzed indexes include performance of both the controllers when subjected to layer 1 and layer 2 switching. For testing purposes Mininet emulator and Distributed-Internet Traffic Generator (D-ITG) traffic generator are used. The results of the evaluation, when layer 1 switching is in question, show, that POX has better traffic handling capabilities, and, as a result, a better performance. But, as far as layer 2 switching is concerned, RYU came up with far better performance results.