Performance Analysis of SDN with a Hybrid Data Plane of MPLS and SDN
Belayneh Teshome Kebie, Mekuanint Agegnehu Bitew, Yesuneh Getachew Taye · 2023
Software defined network (SDN) is an emerging network that enables open networking. It is a network largely made up of virtual devices and managed by the software. The emergence of SDN is dated back to 1990s that is a period of time when two groups called Active Networking and Open Signaling emerged. This time, it is being applicable at many enterprises in small scale that shows it will be the future of networking paradigm. Although it is being applicable in small scale, its performance is still questioning, hence, researchers are proposing various approaches. In this paper, we analyzed the performance of SDN creating hybrid data plane (multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) and OpenFlow). We let MPLS handles low-level packet flows on the data plane by the help of standalone switches that act as bridges while the remaining medium-level and high-level flows are handled by the distributed controllers, this reduced the load of the controllers besides being highly fault tolerant. Using this approach, we run the simulations to measure throughput and jitter with respect to queue size, size of data and link delay, then we found that the proposed method is better than the formal SDN in terms of jitter that is the maximum jitter that the proposed method encountered is 0.012ms unlike the formal SDN with distributed controllers, the maximum jitter of the formal SDN with distributed controllers found to be 0.017ms when 7.8megabyte data is exchanged between two nodes. From our findings, we concluded that using hybrid data plane where the data plane processes small packet flows is an efficient scheme to enhance the performance of the SDN.