Empirical Evaluation of SDN Controllers Using Mininet/Wireshark and Comparison with Cbench

Software-defined networking (SDN) is one of the most promising topics of research today. In this paper, we study the performance of three SDN controllers - ONOS, OpenMUL, and POX, that are implemented in three different programming languages, i.e., Java, C, and Python, respectively, using Mininet and Wireshark packet analysis. We compare the performance of the controllers analyzed using Mininet-Wireshark packet analysis with that of the benchmarking tool Cbench (that uses fake control packets generated from switch instances) in terms of latency and throughput and show that the latter significantly under-estimates the performance evaluation. Additionally, we also study a new performance metric, topology discovery time, that none of the current benchmarking tools capture.