Performances of OpenFlow-Based Software-Defined Networks: An overview

Software Defined Networking (SDN) has gained significant attention from network researchers and industry in recent years. Indeed, the SDN concept provides many advantages such as programmability and easy management of the network. However, it generates new challenges as scalability and performances issues, understanding in-depth the performances and limitations of the SDN concept is a prerequisite to its implementation and deployment in real networks. In this paper, we aim to present in a comprehensive way, the most important works that focus on performances of SDN. As SDN separates the control plane from the data plane, we first present research efforts made to enhance the performances of data plane devices, then, we give an overview of different solutions proposed to improve controller performances. We provide also an overview on recent control plane architectures with multiple controllers that have been proposed to meet performances and scalability constraints. Finally, we present the different techniques and tools used in literature to evaluate the performances of software defined networks.