Developing an asynchronous technique to evaluate the performance of SDN HP Aruba switch and OVS

Developers of Software Defined Network (SDN) faces a lack of or difficulty in getting a physical environment to test their inventions and developments. That drives them to use a virtual environment for their experiments. This work addresses the differences between the SDN virtual environment and physical SDN switches, which leads to equip a more realistic SDN virtual environment. Consequently, this paper presents a precise performance evaluation and comparison of off-the-shelf SDN devices, HP Aruba 3810M, with Open Virtual Switch (OVS) inside Mininet emulator. This work examines the variability of the path delay, throughput, packet losses and jitter of SDN in a different windows size of the packets and network background loads. Our conducted experiments consider a number of protocols such as ICMP, TCP and UDP. In order to evaluate the network latency accurately, a new asynchronous latency measurement technique is proposed. The developed technique shows more precise results in comparison to other techniques. Furthermore, the work focuses on extracting the flow-setup latency, caused by the external SDN controller when setting flow rules into the switch. The comparison of results shows a dissimilarity in the behaviour of SDN hardware and the Mininet emulator. The SDN hardware exposed higher latency and flow-setup time due to extra resources of delay, which the emulator does not possess.