An investigation into the use of software-defined networking controllers

Abstract

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is rapidly gaining acceptance and use in terrestrial networks but little research has been done to apply it to aerial networks. This paper details an investigation on seven open-source controllers using a specific set of criteria based on the characteristics of both aerial and terrestrial networks. It was determined that Open Network Operating System (ONOS) and OpenDaylight (ODL) are the two best foundations for large or complex use cases. It was further discovered that ODL with default parameters can generate extreme amounts of traffic during controller failure and recovery and reacts more slowly than ONOS under the same conditions. This paper also documents a new algorithm created by the author for use in aerial networks that takes advantage of their small size to leverage a highly parallelizable problem representation and solution. This algorithm solves the problem of deciding which directional antennas to align to form connections and efficiently processes frequent updates while generating an exact solution for the optimal path.