The Impact of Distance Between the Data and Control Plane on Openflow Protocol Performance

Abstract

The Internet has led to the creation of a digital society, where most of things is connected to it. However, in spite of their popular adoption, current internet networks are complex and very difficult to manage. With the increasing complexity of traditional IP networks, Software Defined Networking (SDN) has been emergent as a new norm of networking that can solve many of current internet network management problems. Introducing the concepts of SDN into the network architecture brought the idea of physical separation of these two planes, pushing up the control planes to the centralized controller of the architecture and leaving the data planes remained on the network elements. This paper is to investigate that if the control plane is physically moved away from the data plane, what impact does this have on the performance as seen by users of the network. Also, the effect of this physical distance resulted from the separation of these two planes on the most famous protocol (OpenFlow protocol) performance is conducted.