Low-cost SDN switch comparison: Zodiac FX and Raspberry Pi

Abstract

In recent times the Software Defined Networking paradigm has risen as a solution for static configuration and to enforce the fulfillment of network policies. For this reason we analyze the Zodiac FX and Raspberry PI, low cost SDN devices. The main objective will be to find out how well they can perform in small or medium scale networks. In order to accomplish our goal a simple network was used, in which either of the devices was connected to the controller and two hosts. The controller used was Ryu, running under an Ubuntu machine. For the measurement of statistics command line tools from both Ubuntu and OpenFlow were used. One special motivation for the development of this paper is the fact that these devices have not been analyzed in terms of performance. Through the development of this paper we show that the Raspberry PI can be used adequately as a SDN switch. Neither the Zodiac FX nor the Raspberry PI can reach the capacity that the vendors published. And interestingly in terms of bandwidth the Raspberry PI can under certain circumstances have better results than a non SDN conventional CISCO Catalyst switch.