Measuring control plane latency in SDN-enabled switches
Keqiang He, Junaid Khalid, Aaron Gember-Jacobson, Sourav Das, Chaithan Prakash, Aditya Akella, Li Erran Li, Marina Thottan · 2015
Timely interaction between an SDN controller and switches is crucial to many SDN applications---e.g., fast rerouting during link failure and fine-grained traffic engineering in data centers. However, it is not well understood how the control plane in SDN switches impacts these applications. To this end, we conduct a comprehensive measurement study using four types of production SDN switches. Our measurements show that control actions, such as rule installation, have surprisingly high latency, due to both software implementation inefficiencies and fundamental traits of switch hardware.