Controllers in SDN: A Review Report

• Main Authors: Manish Paliwal, Deepti Shrimankar, Omprakash Tembhurne
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2018-01-01
• Series: IEEE Access
• Subjects: OpenFlow; software defined networks (SDN); topology abstraction; pending raw-packet threshold (PRT); model-driven service abstraction layer (MD-SAL)
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8379403/

Software-defined networking (SDN) is a networking scenario which changes the traditional network architecture by bringing all control functionalities to a single location and making centralized decisions. Controllers are the brain of SDN architecture, which perform the control decision tasks while routing the packets. Centralized decision capability for routing enhances the network performance. Through this paper, we presented a review report on various available SDN controllers. Along with the SDN introduction, we discuss the prior work in the field. The review states how the centralized decision capability of the controller changes the network architecture with network flexibility and programmability. We also discuss the two categories of the controller along with some popular available controller. For each controller, we discuss the architectural overview, design aspects, and so on. We also evaluate the performance characteristics by using various metrics, such as throughput, response time, and so on. This paper points to the major state-of-the-art controllers used in industry and academia. Our review work covers major popular controllers used in SDN paradigm.