OpenFlow controller design killing SDN, say network boffins

#OpenFlow 's architecture is inefficient, and caps performance while sucking unnecessary power. That's the conclusion of a bunch of Comp. Sci boffins from researchers at Australian brain box #Data61 and Sydney University, who assessed four major OpenFlow controllers – #NOX, #Maestro, #Floodlight and #Beacon. Their paper is at #Arxiv. Poor old OpenDaylight was also tested but not reported: “the performance [was] too low to provide any insightful comparison”. To cut to the chase: none of the controllers tested got anywhere close to line speed, whether running on a network processor (based on #Tilera chips), or on a Xeon E5-2450-based server (more on the configurations later). On the #CBench software defined networking ( #SDN ) controller benchmark, the best the Tilera setup achieved was just under five million requests per second, compared to a line rate of 29 million requests per second. It seems that Intel's long years of work understanding packet processing is paying off: on the x86 setup, Beacon was able to hit 20 million requests per second; the maximum of the other controllers was 7 million requests per second.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/22/sdn_controller_design_sucks_claim_network_boffins/