OpenFlow over Wireless Networks: Performance Analysis

Software Defined Networking (SDN) and OpenFlow represent the most commonly deployed approaches of the so called Programmable Networks. SDN is an emerging network architecture, which performs the subdivision of control plane and data plane and allows greater speed, greater scalability, and greater ductility in terms of routing and forwarding. OpenFlow, instead, is an SDN component that characterizes the communication between a controller and the devices within the SDN network. Although SDN and OpenFlow work efficiently in wired networks, the integration of these new paradigms over the wireless networks represents still and open issue. In fact, in a dense wireless scenario with an high number of base stations and a limited radio spectrum is still difficult to manage in a proper way operations such as radio spectrum allocation, interference management, handover management, and load balancing among the cells. In this paper, we present a performance analysis of the SDN and OpenFlow over wireless networks. The aim is to evaluate potential advantages introduced by the SDN architecture in terms of Quality of Service (QoS) metrics such as throughput, packet loss, end-to-end delay, and packet delivery ratio. An exhaustive simulation campaign has been conducted through the OMNeT++ network simulator framework by taking into account the new generation IP-based broadband wireless networks. The obtained results shown that the SDN architecture with OpenFlow introduces benefits in the network in term of resource management, transmission data-rate and end-to-end delay.