A measurement study of open source SDN layers in OpenStack under network perturbation

OpenStack is emerging as a dominant player in the cloud management system space in data centers worldwide. The deployment of its various components can be tailored to a very high degree. Among its core components is Neutron, which provides networking-as-a-service and which is often used in conjunction with one of a variety of backend plugins. In this measurement study we evaluate OpenStack's open source SDN layers, using Neutron together with a OpenDaylight, OFAgent, ML2 and Ryu used in OpenStack Juno in the face of different types and severity levels of network errors. To this end we developed a scalable testbed and measured performance in terms of VM-spawning times, launch failure rates and mean-time-between-failures. Our results show that the OpenStack's SDN layers configured to use OpenDaylight performs best across most tested scenarios. We conclude by providing some architectural differences between OpenDaylight and the other three SDN layers that explain the significant performance differences.