Design and implementation of a benchmarking tool for openflow controllers

The growth of data traffic on the web, the virtualization of services, and the changes in the pattern of traffic between users and data centers have led to a reassessment of the current methods of doing network administration. Software Defined Networks (SDNs) propose a paradigm that delegate the control of packets and flows to applications, developed according to specific requirements, where the OpenFlow protocol can be used for communications. The development of this type of applications, as in any other development area, requires tests and measurement tools to facilitate a performance evaluation. However, the current open-source performance measurement applications for SDN networks cover only very basic characteristics, while there is a wide range of SDN controllers with support to many versions of OpenFlow, making the selection of the controller a difficult point to address. In this paper, we propose a distributed performance evaluation tool for SDN controllers, that can assess the throughput, latency, percentage of memory consumption, percentage of CPU utilization, and consumption in kB for input/output interfaces, using OpenFlow version 1.3. Our tool is based on Cbench, and adds new functionalities such as the graphical representation of results to analyze the outcomes. To validate our tool, we make a performance evaluation of well-known SDN controllers such as Ryu, OpenDaylight, OpenMUL, and Floodlight, in environments under great stress of requests.