Investigate and Compare Software-Defined Network Controllers for UAV Networks Management

Abstract

Abstract Unmanned aerial vehicles that abbreviates (UAVs) are flying platforms, known as drones, which have features such as mobility, adaptive altitude and flexibility. UAVs admit numerous applications that can be used as aerial base stations to enhance coverage, capacity, and energy efficiency of wireless networks. On the other hand, UAVs can operate as flying mobile terminals within a cellular network. Such cellular-connected UAVs can enable several applications ranging from real-time video streaming to item delivery. A Software Defined Network (SDN) Controller is the application that acts as a strategic control point in a software-defined network. It is the ’brain’ of the network. Controller manages flow control to the routers/switches ‘under’ (via southbound APIs), the business logic and applications ’above’ (via northbound APIs) to deploy intelligent networks. Wireless networking with software defined (SDWN) is the use of SDN conceptions in wireless networks by using a controller in the control plane. SDWN facilitates the creation of new adaptive mechanisms according to various applications and user requirements, such as mobility, handover, security and quality of service (QoS). In this paper, simulation work has been conducted to compare and investigate four SDN controllers (Pox, Ryu, Floodlight and OpenDaylight) in order to see which one is suitable to be used. Mininet-Wifi has been selected as the simulation tool to do the experiments and Python script for programming. The results obtained reveals that Ryu controller is the best selection in terms of latency and packet loss.