Improving Software Defined Network controllers in a multi-vendor environment

Bereketab Birhanu Deneke; Asrat Mulatu Beyene; Endalew Ayenew Haile

doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e26215

Improving Software Defined Network controllers in a multi-vendor environment

Heliyon. 2024 Feb 14;10(4):e26215. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e26215. eCollection 2024 Feb 29.

Authors

Bereketab Birhanu Deneke¹, Asrat Mulatu Beyene^{2

3}, Endalew Ayenew Haile⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of Computer Science, School of Graduate Studies, St. Mary's University, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
² High Performance Computing & Big Data Analytics CoE, Ethiopia.
³ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Addis Ababa Science and Technology University, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
⁴ Adama Science and Technology University, School of Electrical Engineering and Computing, Electrical Power and Control Engineering, Adama, Ethiopia.

Abstract

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging networking paradigm with the potential to foster innovation through programmable networks. SDNs are characterized by the separation of control and data planes where, in a logically centralized controller, it's possible to make routing decisions on behalf of forwarding elements. For this, there are different protocols proposed and used like Open Flow, Forward and Control Element Separation (FORCES), Path Computation Element Protocol (PCEP), Network Configuration Protocol (NETCONF), and Interface to Routing System (IRS), among others. Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is one such protocol that enables the network programmability promised by SDNs. The controllers used in BGP as control plane protocols leverage RESTCONF (RFC 8040) as management plane protocol to interact with physical routers, switches, and network service firewalls. Therefore, the aim of this work is to improve the performance of SDN controllers using BGP enabling a multi-vendor environment without requiring infrastructure upgrade showcasing how interoperability can be achieved. The proposed system is implemented using OpenDaylight controllers. The performance of the prototype is evaluated using Latency, Throughput, CPU consumption, and TTL (Time to Live). Based on the simulation results it is observed that the SDN controllers that use BGP show average throughput of 49.6 Gbps, maximum latency of 7 μs, and average CPU consumption 89% and maximum TTL value of 600 msec. The overall performance of the proposed system shows better results when compared with previous works.

Keywords: Border gateway protocol; Network performance evaluation; Network simulation; Software defined network.