关键词: 软件定义网络, 控制器, 分布式控制器, 性能比较

Abstract: Software defined networking (SDN) separates the control plane from the data plane, thus the former can be significantly simplified when facing a complex network environment. Since the control plane largely determines the network performance, many companies and institutions have proposed their controllers, some of which are open-source. However, there is a lack of systematic and complete comparison among these controllers. Thus, the researchers have to make their decisions according to their experiences and intuitions due to the insufficient evidences. To address this problem, this paper does a survey of state-of-the-art SDN controllers and compares their architecture and implementation and their performance using Cbench and Mininet. Besides, considering the bottleneck of the single controller in control plane, this paper presents an overview of some distributed controllers. The results have a great reference significance for the researchers to choose the right controllers.

Key words: software defined networking, controller, distributed controllers, performance comparison