What you need to know about SDN control and data planes

SDN and OpenFlow are actively being standardized and deployed. These deployments rely on switches that come from various vendors and differ in terms of their performance and available features. Understanding these differences and basic performance characteristics is essential for ensuring efficient deployments. In this paper we measure, report, and explain the performance characteristics of the controland data-planes in three hardware OpenFlow switches. Our results can help controller developers to make their programs efficient. Further, we also highlight differences between the OpenFlow specification and its implementations, that if ignored, pose a serious threat to network security and correctness.