Network Virtualization in Multi-hop Heterogeneous Architecture

Software Defined Networking is a technology that introduces modular and programmable networks that uses separated control- and data-planes. Traditional networks use mostly proprietary protocols and devices that needs to communicate with each other and share information about routes and paths in the network. SDN on the other hand uses a controller that communicates with devices through an open source protocol called OpenFlow. The routing rules of flows can be inserted into the networking devices by the controller. This technology is still new and it requires more research to provide evidence that it can perform better, or at least as good as, the conventional networks. By doing some experiments on different topologies, this thesis aims at discovering how delays of flows are affected by having OpenFlow in the network, and identifying overhead of using such technology. The results show that, the overhead can be to large for time and noise sensitive applications and average delay is comparable to conventional networks