1. On Controller Performance in Software-Defined Networks
Author: Amin Tootoonchian, Sergey Gorbunov, Yashar Ganjali, Martin Casado and Rob Sherwood
Publisher:
Presenter: Yu Hao, Tseng
Date: 2013/05/29

2. Outline Introduction NOX-MT Experiment Setup Controller Throughput
Controller Response Time
Cbench

3. Introduction
How fast can the controller respond to data path requests?
How many data path requests can it handle per second?
For example :
NOX handles around 30k flow initiation events per second while maintaining a sub-10ms flow install time [14].
Kandula et al. [9] found that a 1500-server cluster has a median flow arrival rate of 100k flows per second.
Benson et al. [2] show that a network with 100 switches can have spikes of 10M flows arrivals per second in the worst case.
We present NOX-MT a publicly-available multithreaded successor of NOX.

4. NOX-MT NOX is not optimized for performance and is single-threaded.
The techniques to optimize NOX are including :
I/O batching to minimize the overhead of I/O
Port the I/O handling harness to Boost Asynchronous I/O (ASIO) library
Use a fast multiprocessor-aware malloc implementation
NOX-MT is far from perfect.
Heavy use of dynamic memory allocation and redundant memory copies on a per-request basis
Using locking were robust wait-free alternatives exist

5. Experiment Setup
Cbench emulates a configurable number of OpenFlow switches that all communicate with a single OpenFlow controller.
Each emulated switch sends a configurable number of new flow messages to the OpenFlow controller, waits for the appropriate flow setup responses, and records the difference in time between request and response.
Cbench supports two modes of operation :
Latency
Throughput

6. Controller Throughput
Maximum throughput

7. Controller Throughput (Cont.)
Relation with the number of active switches

8. Controller Throughput (Cont.)
Relation with the load level

9. Controller Throughput (Cont.)
Effect of write-intensive workload

10. Controller Response Time
Minimum response time
Average response times of all controllers are between 100 and 150 microseconds.
Maximum response time

11. Controller Response Time (Cont.)
Relation with the load level

12. Controller Response Time (Cont.)
Relation with the number of active switches

13. Cbench

14. Cbench (Cont.)

15. Cbench (Cont.)

16. Cbench (Cont.) responses/s min max avg stdev NOX 42620.00 232301.74
POX
54.54