Performance Analysis of SDN/OpenFlow Controllers: POX Versus Floodlight

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging network architecture that is adaptable, dynamic, cost-effective, and manageable. The SDN architecture is a form of network virtualization where the network controlling functions and forwarding functions are decoupled. A setup and configuration task of a control plane to work as an SDN controller is explained in this paper. This paper includes a brief survey of different SDN based OpenFlow-enabled controllers available in various programmable languages. This paper mainly focuses on two OpenFlow-enabled controllers, namely, POX—a Python-based controller and Floodlight—a Java-based controller. A performance comparison of both controllers is tested over different network topologies by analyzing network throughput and round-trip delay using an efficient network simulator called Mininet. A single, linear, tree and custom (user-defined) topologies are designed in Mininet by enabling external controllers. It is obtained that, a percentage improvement in round-trip time for Floodlight over POX is 11.5, 13.9, 19.6 and 14.4% for single, linear, tree and custom topology respectively. Similarly, a percentage improvement in throughput for Floodlight over POX is 5.4, 8.9, 3.8 and 4.9% for single, linear, tree and custom topology respectively.