As computer networks evolve, they become more complex, introducing several challenges in the areas of performance and management. Such problems can lead to stagnation in network innovation. Software Defined Networks (SDN) framework could be one of the best candidates for improving and revolutionising networking by giving the full control to the network administrators to implement new management and performance optimisation techniques. This thesis examines performance issues faced in SDN due to the introduction of the SDN Controller. These issues include the extra delay due to the round-trip time between the switch and the controller as well as the fact that some packets arrive at the destination out-of-order. We propose a novel dynamic flow installation and management algorithm (OFPE) using the SDN protocol OpenFlow, which preserves the controller to a non-overloaded CPU state and allow it to dynamically add and adjust flow table rules to reduce packet delay and out-of-order packets. In addition, we propose OFPEX, an extension to OFPE algorithm that includes techniques for managing multi-switch environments as well as methods that make use of the packets interarrival time in categorising and serving packet flows. Such techniques allow topology awareness, helping the controller to install flow table rules in such a way to form optimal routes for high priority flows thus increasing network performance. For the performance evaluation of the proposed algorithms, both hardware testbed as well as emulation experiments have been conducted. The performance results indicate that OFPE algorithm achieves a significant enhancement in performance in the form of reduced delay by up to 92.56% (depending on the scenario), reduced packet loss by up to 55.32% and reduced out-of-order packets by up to 69.44%. Furthermore, we propose a novel placement algorithm for distributed Mininet implementations which uses weights in order to distribute the experiment components to the appropriately distributed machines. The proposed algorithm uses static code analysis in order to examine the experimental code as well as it measures the capabilities of physical components in order to create a weights table which is then used to distribute the experiment components properly. The performance results of the proposed algorithm evaluation indicated reductions in delay and packet loss of up to 65.51% and 86.35% respectively, as well as a decrease in the standard deviation of CPU usage by up to 88.63%. These results indicate that the proposed algorithm distributes the experiment components evenly across the available resources. Finally, we propose a series of Benchmarking tests that can be used to rate all the available SDN experimental platforms. These tests allow the selection of the appropriate experimental platform according to the scenario needs as well as they indicate the resources needed by each platform.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:756479 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Isaia, Philippos |
| Publisher | Loughborough University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/2134/33329 |
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