Performance evaluation of software-defined networking with real-life ISP traffic

Software-defined networking (SDN) is an emerging network architecture and OpenFlow is one of the representative works in SDN. As a possible approach towards future network, it has been introduced into a lot of application scenarios. Although SDN/OpenFlow have a lot of advantages, it is still debatable that whether they can manipulate a significant amount of real-life traffic when they are deployed in a large-scale ISP (Internet Service Provider) network. However, there are few studies of performance evaluation of SDN/OpenFlow system with real-life traffic. In this paper we present OFSim, an event-driven OpenFlow simulator that supports the performance evaluation of OpenFlow system with packet-level real-life traffic traces. We use OFSim to perform evaluations with real-life ISP traffic and experimental results show that: (i) Current OpenFlow switch implementations cannot meet the need of real-life ISP traffic; (ii) Although the issue of controller scalability exists, greater performance bottleneck may be located in the current OpenFlow switches, and the flow table entry installation delay is a more pressing issue. This study can be helpful to better understand the performance bottleneck of OpenFlow system under the scenario in an ISP network.