Queueing Analysis of Software Defined Network with Realistic OpenFlow–Based Switch Model

Abstract

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is the latest network architecture that does for networking what virtualisation did for servers in data centres. In SDN, separation of the control plane from the data plane brought about new flexibility in the routing of flows through the network. Closely associated with SDN is OpenFlow, the most widely used protocol governing the information exchange between the data plane (switching devices) and the control plane (controller). The ease of implementing and testing new schemes in SDN has prompted many researchers to adopt the experimental and prototyping approach to validate their ideas. Consequently, there has been very little work done to evaluate the performance of SDN and/or OpenFlow-based networks analytically. While the experimentation approach in validation has merits, analytical modelling provides valuable insights by making explicit the dependence of SDN performance on chosen parameters. In this paper: (i) we propose a queueing model of an OpenFlow-based SDN that takes into account classful treatment of packets arriving at a switch and (ii) derive an exact analysis of the proposed queueing model.