Performance Analysis of Software-Defined Networks (SDN) via POX Controller Simulation in Mininet

Traditional networks are difficult to manage because the software that controls the network (the control plane) is tightly coupled with the hardware that forwards traffic (the data plane). Each router makes its own decisions, which can lead to inefficiencies and conflicts. Software-defined networking (SDN) addresses these limitations by decoupling the control and data planes. This allows for direct programming of network control and makes the network more flexible and manageable. SDN platforms offer several benefits, including programmability, virtualization, and simplified network management. However, they also face challenges related to scalability and performance. It is therefore important to understand and assess SDN performance before deploying it in real-world networks. This paper explores the operation of SDN with the POX controller and assesses its performance metrics. POX is an open-source SDN controller built on the Python platform. It is a valuable tool for developing and monitoring new network applications with a number of hosts. It is also easy to deploy because it is installed by default in the Mininet environment. Mininet is the emulation tool that is used to run the various topologies in the SDN environment, and the topologies are viewed in the MiniEdit tool. The work evaluates the performance of a custom-based Linear Topology network with 10 hosts and 10 switches which are created in the POX controller. The experimentation results examine the performance of node-to-node delivery, network bandwidth, and round-trip time in Linear Topology. The future aim is to evaluate all types of topologies in Ryu as well as Java-based controllers to know optimization results for future research work.