Comparative analysis of the performance of open shortest path first and openflow on quality-of-service metrics in a large simulated mobile core network

Abstract

Mobile application systems are increasingly being defined using Internet Protocol (IP). Therefore, one of the challenging tasks that mobile IP phone service companies have to deal with as their networks expand is an upsurge of user equipment (UE) and routers, which places excessive demand on the routing infrastructure and results in degraded quality of service (QoS) values at the mobile core network. Studies show that most mobile IP phone subscriber companies struggle to meet acceptable QoS values due to their continued use of classical routing methods. Classical routing protocols such as Open Shortes Path First (OSPF) lose efficiency as the network size increases, which leads to poor QoS values. An attempt to explore emerging Software Defined Network (SDN) technologies to enhance QoS and promote a centralized controller-basedrouting method has emerged in the recent past. OpenFlow routing is an instance of SDN found to improve routing in wired and small wireless networks. This study'smain objective was to compare the performance of OSPF and OpenFlow routing in a large mobile IP core network. Specific objectives weretocompare the performance of OSPF and OpenFlow routing on jitter, packet delivery ratio (PDR), throughput, and end-to-end delay. This research adopted a mixed design methodology consisting of exploratory and experimental research design where Objective Modular Network Testbed in C++ (OMNeT++) network simulator was used with simuLTE add-on to model two side-by-side mobile IP networks core architecturerunning OSPF and OpenFlow protocols. Applications that present high demand for processing and routing used; interactive gaming, VoiP, audio streaming, and Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) were used to test routing efficiency. The setup test environment consisted of 1000 UEs, 80 OSPF routers, and 80 OpenFlow switches which are considered a large network. Notably, Jitter was improved by 10 milliseconds when OpenFlow routing was used compared to OSPF. This improvement was consistent across the network with the addition of more UEs and Routers. In instances where OSPF improved PDR, the value is less significant, with a standard deviation of 0.7 mbs. This study demonstrated that OpenFlow could improve routing efficiency in large simulated mobile IP core networks compared to the OSPF routing network by over 60 percent across the four QoS metrics considered in the experiment. The study also confirmed that the network size impacts the QoS parameters. This study further recommends testing OpenFlow in large mobile IP production networks.