In the current innovative network, to cope with the increased require-

ments of customers, there is a rapid increase in the development of dierent

protocols and applications. With such increase in networking technology,

the security constraints are becoming more and more severe, reducing the

accessibility to the actual network for implementing new protocols. This

scenario forced for an urgent need of a technology, which can help the re-

searchers to implement their developed protocols in the network without

inuencing the production trac. This need resulted in a concept called

network isolation. This is achieved by VLAN or SDN technologies.

In this study, we investigate the performance of VLAN and an API

of SDN in the context of establishing dynamic link, in switching setup. For

such a link creation, dynamic VLAN (dVLAN) is used in the former case

and OpenFLow protocol is used in the later scenario. The main focus in this

study is to compare the dynamic behavior of both the protocols in layer-2

context by measuring network level performance metrics of each protocol.

Some of the features like, vendor independency and software independency

is taken into account while measuring the performance metrics.

In order to evaluate the performance, an experimental testbed is

implemented. The network level performance metric called protocol setup

time is measured. It is the time taken by each protocol to setup an active

link between two end-hosts. A two-tire network architecture is implemented

with the mentioned features.

From the analytical and statistical results obtained, OpenFlow re-

sulted in performing relatively better when compared to dynamic VLANs.

By carefully examining the protocol setup time of OpenFlow against dVLAN,

OpenFlow took less time when compared to dVLAN resulting in faster exe-

cution in enabling connectivity. On the other hand, the analytical study on

the two protocols reects the simplicity exhibited by dVLAN over Open-

Flow.