A QoS-based evaluation of SDN controllers: ONOS and OpenDayLight

Abstract

SDN marks a paradigm shift towards an externalized and logically centralized controller, unlike the legacy networks where control and data planes are tightly coupled. The controller has a comprehensive view of the network, offering flexibility to enforce new traffic engineering policies and easing automation. In SDN, a high performance controller is required for efficient traffic management. In this paper, we conduct a performance evaluation of two distributed SDN controllers, namely ONOS and OpenDayLight. Specifically, we use the Mininet emulation environment to emulate different topologies and the D-ITG traffic generator to evaluate aforementioned controllers based on metrics such as delay, jitter and packet loss. The experimental results show that ONOS provides a significantly higher latency, jitter and low packet loss than OpenDayLight in all topologies. We attribute the poor performance of OpenDayLight to its excessive CPU utilization and propose the use of Hyper-threading to improve its performance. This work provides practitioners in the telecoms industry with guidelines towards making informed controller selection decisions.