Performance Analysis of Mininet-based Testbed for Software Defined Network with P4 Programmable Data Plane

Network technology has continued to evolve because of the expanding use of the internet in numerous fields. One approach for addressing the difficulties of maintaining larger networks is Software-Defined Networking (SDN), which separates the control plane and data plane. Typically, SDN utilizes OpenFlow as an API for communication between the control plane and data plane. However, OpenFlow has limitations, such as the restricted set of protocols that can be defined in the header as it also does not control the switch behavior of processing the packets. SDN with programmable data plane using P4 offers flexibility in defining protocols or how packets are processed in the data plane, addressing these limitations. This Mininet-based testbed development for P4 is addressed to analyze performance through parameters such as delay, jitter, throughput, packet loss, and CPU usage. Based on the experiment, the amount of processing packets must go through has an impact on the delay seen in the testing. The jitter resulted in relatively small values which indicated stable delays. The throughput achieved in all scenarios was still far below the allocated bandwidth. This can be attributed to the allocation of bandwidth exceeding the server’s specification limits where Mininet is running, leading to high CPU usage and suboptimal packet delivery. Consequently, a significant packet loss rate is observed as well.