Performance And Power Analysis Of Software Defined Networking Control Planes Based On Queuing Theory:Modeling And Comparison

Software Defined Networking(SDN)is a novel network architecture,and it composed of data plane,control plane and application plane.SDN provides flexibility and programmability for network management by using the layered architecture.OpenFlow is one popular protocol between data plane and control plane for communication in SDN architecture.The control planes currently deployed in SDN are mainly based on OpenFlow.Control planes can be divided into three categories from architectural perspective:centralized,flat and hierarchical structures.Of these categories,centralized control planes can be further divided into single-threaded single controllers,multithreading single controllers and cluster controllers,and flat control planes can be further divided into local and global view strategy structures.Hierarchical structures only have one category.After subdivision,control planes have six categories.Control plane is the core part of the SDN architecture,and its evolution of performance and power consumption is an important issue.When deploying a control plane for a SDN network,technical staffs often need to evaluate their performance and power consumption quickly or previously.However,it is more costly,time-consuming and even pointlessly to evaluate control planes' performance and power consumption by real experiments.Therefore,it is necessary to establish analytical models of control planes.Some control planes,such as single-thread single controllers and global view strategy of flat control planes,already have performance analytical models.However,the analytical models for multithreading single controllers and cluster controllers are still lack.In addition,there are no analytical models for the power consumption of control planes except single-thread single controllers.Whether for performance or power consumption,technical staffs need to weigh and compare when deploying and selecting which type of SDN control planes.However,there is no generic method forcomparing these two aspects at present.Therefore,this paper presents the performance and power consumption analytical models for the relevant control planes,and designs a generic comparison framework for the performance and power consumption of various SDN control planes.Experimental results show that when the packet arrival rate increases,the processing time of various control planes increases accordingly.In particular,the processing time of the hierarchical architecture is significantly higher than that of other control plane architectures.In contrast to processing time,multithreading single controllers consumes the most power when the number of data plane domains is less than 9 while controllers of hierarchical structures consumes the most power when the number of data plane domains is greater than 9.