¹School of Computer and Communication Engineering, Changsha University of Science and Technology, Changsha 410114, China.
²School of Software, Central South University, Changsha 410075, China.

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Abstract—Software-defined Networking (SDN) is commonly seen as a promising way towards future Internet. Understanding the performance and limitation of its logically centralized controllers is a prerequisite of SDN deployments. For this end, this paper proposes a concise queuing model for SDN controller performance. We first investigate that the input of a SDN controller is a hybrid Poisson stream of packet-in messages. Then, we analyze the message processing of a SDN controller to achieve a concise queuing model M/M/1 for its performance, and further derive its performance parameters from queuing theory. Finally, our proposed model is evaluated by measuring a well-known controller with the benchmark Cbench. Experimental results indicate that our model is a better approximation of the controller performance than the existing ones.

Index Terms—software-defined networking, SDN controllers, performance evaluation, queuing model.

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Cite: Bing Xiong, Xia Peng, Jinyuan Zhao, "A Concise Queuing Model for Controller Performance in Software-Defined Networks," Journal of Computers vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 232-237, 2016.