Performance Evaluation of Flow Creation Inside an OpenFlow Network

A top concern in Software Defined Networking (SDN) is the management of network flows because of resource limitation in SDN devices (such as TCAM size) and the signaling overhead between the control and data plane elements. This work performs an evaluation of reactive, proactive and active strategies for creating flows inside an SDN network. The results indicated a trade-off between memory space utilization and signaling overhead, where each approach has benefits and drawbacks. The proactive approach is more suitable when all paths are predicted with high accuracy, resulting in high memory consumption and low signaling overhead. When the network requires frequent adjustments, the reactive strategy is indicated providing a low memory consumption and high signaling intensive approach. Finally, the active strategy can be used when memory and signaling are critical problems because of the median memory consumption and signaling overhead.