Deutsch Intern
Chair of Computer Science III

SDN-Perf (Bayerisches Foerderprogramm IKT)

SDN-Perf (Bayerisches Förderprogramm IKT)

Project Partners


Project Team

Head

Researchers

Students

  • Lorenz Reinhart

Project Goals

  • Performance Assessment of the Interaction between Network Management and SDN-based Network Control
  • Integration of information provided by NMS into SDN Controllers
  • Integration of information provided by SDN Controllers into NMS

Duration

  • 36 months

Staff

  • University of Würzburg: 1 research assistant per year
  • Infosim: 1 research assistant per year

Methodology

  • Design, modeling, and evaluation
  • Controller to NMS
  • NMS to controller
  • Testbed implementation (SDN controller module)

Possible Architecture

Given a typical deployment featuring Network Management Software (NMS), Figure 1 displays a high-level view on the typical components and the information flow between them. The NMS needs to implement vendor-specific interfaces in order to accomplish configuration tasks by communicating with the control plane of forwarding elements. In case of monitoring, standardized protocols like SNMP can be used.

Figure 1 - Typical Components and Information Flow in Network Management Software (NMS)

In contrast, Figure 2 illustrates an SDN-based infrastructure and its possible integration with an NMS. Since the control plane interaction is handled by the logically centralized SDN controller, the NMS can contact the SDN controller through the northbound API when configuration and SDN-specific monitoring tasks need to be performed. Monitoring in general could still be performed via SNMP or Netflow.

Figure 2 - Possible Interaction between NMS and an SDN Architecture