Queueing Theoretic Approach for Performance-Aware Modeling of Sustainable SDN Control Planes

Software Defined Networking (SDN) provides flexibility and programmability for network management by using a layered structure composed of data plane, control plane, and application plane. A key enabling technique for the sustainability of SDN-based network infrastructure is the modeling of power consumed by SDN control planes. However, power modeling of control planes is not extensively investigated yet, and no generic methods have been developed for performance and power comparison of sustainable SDN control planes. In this paper, we propose analytical performance and power models for different network controllers by using queuing theory, and design a generic framework for performance and power evaluation of different sustainable SDN control planes. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed solution can precisely model the power and performance of the concerned SDN control planes such that different control planes can be benchmarked under a general framework, which enables the identification of suitable control planes for various SDN network applications.