OpenFlow Version Roadmap

Software-defined networking is an emerging networking architecture that enables flexible network control by separating the control plane and data plane while OpenFlow is the key to widespread adoption of SDN. The development of the OpenFlow has an inseparable relation with the prospection of SDN. Thus, in this study, we provide an overview of OpenFlow's evolution by comparing major feature changes, and discuss about the underlying reasons. We will also examine the maturity of products by performing conformance test against two OpenFlow-enabled software switches: Open vSwitch and Lagopus, with two test tools: Ryu test and OFTest. The test results show that both switches have passed conformance test for OpenFlow 1.3, and the number of optional features implemented by Lagopus has outnumbered Open vSwitch; however, Lagopus would crashed under certain test we conducted, thus its stability is still in doubt.