Evaluation of Four SDN Controllers with Firewall Modules
Ryhan Uddin, Md Fahad Monir · 2020
Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a revolutionary concept that has taken the networking industry by storm. It provides robust control over its network elements by ensuring programmability and customization of network policies. Gone are the days where advanced policy upgradations required equally expensive hardwares, vendor locked features and overly complicated web of redundant devices. Now SDN ensures single point policy implementation and network orchestration through controllers and smart devices (aka. White boxes) which defines the future of dynamic networking. Witnessing the dynamic nature of SDN, tech giants are coming up with their own version of controllers to race towards the network control supremacy. To name some of them, ODL (OpenDaylight), POX, Floodlight, Ryu are some the leading and most popular controllers that are currently on the focus of SDN industry. In this paper, we have tried to use four of these aforementioned controllers and implemented simple firewalls where we have measured the throughput of these controllers while the firewall policy was in place within a virtual network. We have measured the packet transmissions through TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and UDP (User Datagram Protocol) and made a comparison of parameters like data transmission rate and packet loss percentage for different time intervals. From our work it was evident that ODL performed exceedingly well having the least amount of packet loss (0.0039%) and also having the highest yield of uncapped Bandwidth (32.75 Gbits/sec.) while having the firewall modules in place.