Performance evaluation of openflow controllers for network virtualization

This paper investigates OpenFlow performance, focusing on how the delay between switch and OpenFlow controller can impact the performance of a network. We use open-source controllers that support network virtualization to evaluate how such delay impacts ICMP, TCP and UDP traffic. We compare the controllers´ flow set-up strategies and we conduct several experiments to compare their TCP and UDP performance. In ad-dition, we introduce a new metric to measure UDP packet losses at the beginning of the flow. The results of the measurements indicate that there are large differences in performance between controllers, and that performance depends on switch-controller delay and flow set-up strategy.