Survey of software components to emulate OpenFlow protocol as an
Contents
1. POX controller is another SDN control platform and it is considered an active development tool POX was derived from NOX controller platform with the main difference is using Python programming language instead of C platform POX uses Python API version 2 7 to support network virtualization SDN debugging and different application such as layer 2 switch bridge hub etc 22 NOX and POX controllers support the same GUI and visualization tools to setup configure controllers and flow tables POX still does not support OpenFlow 1 3 which many other controllers support now 5 3 Floodlight Floodlight is a very popular SDN controller It is a contribution from Big Switch Networks and it uses Java based platform API thus it runs within a Java Virtual Machine JVM and it is considered suitable with continuous increase in number of network devices switches that deal with OpenFlow concept 11 23 Floodlight controller realizes a set of common functionalities to control and inquire an OpenFlow network The controller has features of simple to extend and enhance easy to setup with minimal dependencies support for Open Stack Quantum cloud topology management and it deals with mixed OpenFlow and non OpenFlow network Floodlight supports applications that include a learning switch hub application firewall and static flow push applications 21 Floodlight as POX does not support OpenFlow 1 3 5 4 OpenDaylight OpenDaylight is2. API From the other side the controller uses a northbound API to deal with various applications If we made an analogy for the network as an orchestra then the controller plays the role of the maestro In fact some SDN implementations use these designations to refer to SDN and the controller 11 19 As the basic concept of SDN is to decouple the control American Journal of Software Engineering and Applications 2014 3 6 74 82 78 plane and the management plane from the data forwarding plane then the controller has to bear all the burden of controlling and managing all the data forwarding devices It should maintain and update through the rule placement algorithm information about all the forwarding devices that are under direct responsibility of the controller including their flow tables links and states The routing policy is another task of the controller any change in any forwarding device state causes the controller to reshape the routing path of all flows traverse that device resulting in updates to a large number of switches flow tables Security strategies along with end devices policy are also placed in the controller Applications Northbound API Controller Rule Placement Algorithm End Devices Policy Data Base Routing Policy Southbound API Forwarding Devices Fig 5 Block diagram of the controller As mentioned above the controller plays a vital role in the OpenFlow network therefore mu
3. Flood aS Fannie ee Open 1 0 1 3 Daylight wcb UI Linux Windows Re ae ae VND Linux Nicira extension 1 0 1 3 1 VND Linux 10 VND Windows Linux OSX each slice is controlled by a different controller 28 It does not support OpenFlow 1 3 yet RouteFlow can be considered as a network application on top of general OpenFlow controllers The major objective of RouteFlow is to build up an open source framework for virtual IP routing solution over product hardware implementing the OpenFlow API 29 6 Switch Software OpenFlow switch is an important component of software defined network switch connects with controller and when a packet arrives to the switch the switch performs a number of processes compares the packet header with flow entries and identifies the actions to be implemented as illustrated in prior sections Mininet can support different type of switches such as 6 1 Open vSwitch OVS Open vSwitch is a production quality open source software switch designed to be used as a virtual switch in large scale virtualized environments Open vSwitch supports many flavors of Linux operating systems such as Debian Ubuntu and Fedora Furthermore it supports Windows and FreeBSD operating systems 30 Open vSwitch uses OpenFlow protocol to support the efficient management virtual switch configuration and QoS policies need to be applied across a large number of hosts Open vSwitch supports OpenFlow versions 1 0 1
4. an OpenFlow controller It has open and reference framework for programmability and control through open source SDN it uses JVM so it can be used with any platform or operating system that supports Java 1 7 It is a modular extensible scalable and multi protocol controller infrastructure built for SDN deployment on modern heterogeneous multi vendor networks 21 24 OpenDaylight enables users to reduce operational complexity extend the lifetime of their testing network infrastructure and enable new services and capabilities In our test of OpenDaylight it proved to have an excellent GUI but Iperf command undergo the same problems that we faced with NOX when dealing with controller 79 Mohammed Basheer Al Somaidai and Estabrak Bassam Yahya Survey of Software Components to Emulate OpenFlow Protocol as an SDN Implementation Table 3 Controller software implementations Progra mming Name Vendor language NOX Nicira Cant POX Nicira Python Floodlight Big Switch Networks Java Linux Foundation Open Daiei Collaborative Project ne Nippon Telegraph and Ryu Telephone Corporation Byer Mul kulcloud C Beacon Stanford University Java 5 5 Ryu Ryu is a component based open source framework implemented entirely in Python Nevertheless the Ryu messaging service does support components developed in other languages 25 The goal of Ryu is to develop an operating system for SDN that has high quality enough for use in large net
5. version there is huge development every year 4 SDN Development Platforms There are many platforms that could be used by researchers to emulate and or simulate their SDN projects Researchers use these tools to perform experiments study the behavior of the network and develop new methods to support different applications In this section a description of these currently available SDN platforms is presented emphasizing on the rapidly developed and deployed Mininet platform Table 2 gives an overview of some properties of these platforms or tio q om wer k x gt Need a reply message N Notify only message JIL O d Controller to switch Asynchronous Symmetric gt I lt Packet In gt Hello gt aX Handshake Switch Configuration Flow Removed gt Echo Flow Table Configuration Port Status gt Error Modify State gt Table Status gt Experimenter Multipart gt Request Forward gt Packet Out gt Controller Role Status gt Barrier Role Request Bundle Set Asynchronous Configuration Fig 4 OpenFlow protocol messages Table 1 OpenFlow switch standards properties Version Property 1 0 1 1 1 2 1 3 1 4 Publication date Dec 31 2009 Feb 28 2011 Dec 5 2011 Jun 25 2012 Oct 15 2013 Widely deployed Yes No No No No Flow table single multiple multiple multiple multiple Group table N
6. 1 1 2 1 3 As well it supports other standard management protocols such as SNMP or NETCONF Additionally Open vSwitch provides interfaces to monitoring protocols such as sFlow and NetFlow 31 Open vSwitch is commonly used with Mininet emulator for testing networks that use OpenFlow protocol 21 6 2 OF SoftSwitch13 OFSoftSwitchl13 is an OpenFlow 1 3 compatible user space software switch implementation This project is American Journal of Software Engineering and Applications 2014 3 6 74 82 80 supported by Evicsson Innovation center Brazil 21 Mininet users can install the switch software NOX controller that supports OpenFlow version 1 3 and download useful documentation to run and configure OFSoftSwitch13 from public Github web site 32 6 3 LINC LINC is an open source project that supports OpenFlow protocol versions 1 2 and 1 3 LINC is architected to use generally available commodity x86 hardware and runs in various operating systems such as Linux Windows Mac etc 21 Mininet user can install this switch software from Github web site 33 6 4 Indigo Virtual Switch IVS Indigo project is an open source project which supports OpenFlow protocol on physical and hypervisor switches It is designed for high performance and minimal administration and it uses the hardware feature of Application Specific Integrated Circuit ASICs of Ethernet switch to run OpenFlow at line speed 21 Indigo Virtual Switch is
7. 6 Mininet uses Linux kernels along with Python language scripts to construct a virtual network of large number of hosts network OpenFlow switches and controllers in any network topology the researcher employs over a single desktop or laptop station Mininet could use its built in software tools to develop such networks through Command Line Interface CLI or adapts to a third party software tools that implement other controllers or Graphic User Interface GUI engines 15 16 It has the flexibility of adding many controller types that will be mentioned in section 5 4 2 EstiNet EstiNet is an emulation and simulation platform of many network protocols one of them is OpenFlow protocol It also supports some of the controllers of section V EstiNet is a proprietary software tool and it uses the company servers to run the simulation or the emulation projects This cloud service is referred to as Simulation as a Service 17 EstiNet has good simulation properties among them are accurate and repeatable result with a graphical user interface and packet animation along with good presentation of the simulation statistics as a graph for each node in the network 5 4 3 ns 3 ns 3 is a well established network simulator usually compared to OPNET for providing simulation environment to a wide range of network protocols ns 3 supports OpenFlow protocol and its switches in simulator environment but it cannot readily run a real OpenFlow con
8. American Journal of Software Engineering and Applications 2014 3 6 74 82 Published online December 16 2014 http www sciencepublishinggroup com j ajsea doi 10 11648 j ajsea 20140306 12 ISSN 2327 2473 Print ISSN 2327 249X Online Seiemned Me Science Publishing Group Survey of software components to emulate OpenFlow protocol as an SDN implementation Mohammed Basheer Al Somaidai Estabrak Bassam Yahya Dept of Electrical Engineering Mosul University Mosul Iraq Email address mohammedbasheerabdullah uomosul edu ig M B Al Somaidai eng est_1990 yahoo com E B Yahya To cite this article Mohammed Basheer Al Somaidai Estabrak Bassam Yahya Survey of Software Components to Emulate OpenFlow Protocol as an SDN Implementation American Journal of Software Engineering and Applications Vol 3 No 6 2014 pp 74 82 doi 10 11648 j ajsea 20140306 12 Abstract Software Defined Networks SDN is the next wave in networking evolution It may be considered as a revolution rather than an evolution since many concepts of conventional network protocols are reshaped OpenFlow protocol is the most widely deployed protocol in SDN Emulation of OpenFlow based network projects facilitates the implementation of new ideas and driving the development of the protocol In this paper a summary of many software components related to OpenFlow is presented Most of these software components were tested by the researchers in or
9. Survey of Software Components to Emulate OpenFlow Protocol as an SDN Implementation network to understand SDN and centralized control concept by using different controllers platform In addition studies have measured the performance of OpenFlow networks through modeling and experimentation The researchers clarify the challenges facing the large scale OpenFlow networks and applications The rest of this paper is structured as follows in section 2 we briefly discuss software defined network architecture Section 3 introduces an overview of OpenFlow protocol its fundamental concepts and messages Some SDN and OpenFlow platforms are presented and compared in section 4 while sections 5 and 6 give a survey of OpenFlow software controllers and switches respectively Any OpenFlow project could make use of some tools that are presented in section 7 Finally section 8 contains some concluding remarks and future work suggestions 2 Software Defined Networks SDN The adaptation of packet switching in networking made each network device such as gateway router or switch a standalone device These devices manage themselves independently even if this management was according to a certain routing protocol or administration policy Each data packet undergoes the same parsing and processing efforts at each network node even if it belongs to the same flow This conventional architecture of networks may fail to support the dramatically increase in
10. a lightweight high performance virtual switch support OpenFlow version 1 0 only It is designed to enable virtualization in big networks applications as it is used with floodlight controller 34 7 Tools Mininet emulator can be integrated with a number of open source tools to meet and implement the different needs of Mininet users such as editors GUI and benchmarks etc 7 1 Editors Mininet user can use one of the Integrated Development Environment IDE supported by Mininet environment such as Python IDLE version 2 7 Python IDLE version 3 2 GNU Emacs editor and Nano editor as a text editor for writing code to build and configure the network topology 7 2 Graphic User Interface GUD There are a number of GUIs that are used to configure network elements controller switches and hosts and display network topology They include many component such as 7 2 1 Miniedit Miniedit is a simple Python script presented with Mininet examples It is used as GUI to construct network topology and emulate it Miniedit was developed to add new features and capabilities for the purpose of forming a networks such as the use of the remote controller and multi controllers select properties of the links controller switches and hosts provide command line interface terminals for each node use monitoring protocols sFlow NetFlow and export python script for network topology 15 7 2 2 Visual Network Description VND Visua
11. as 256 entries Each entry in the flow table contains six sections as shown in Fig 3 OpenFlow Controller a OpenFlow Switch OpenFlow Channel Flow Table 0 Flow Table Flow Table 1 n Counters Counters Counters Pipeline Pipeline Ports Types Counters Fig 2 Architecture of an OpenFlow switch Meter Table Group Table Counters Counters American Journal of Software Engineering and Applications 2014 3 6 74 82 76 Matching Fields Cookie Priority Counters Instructions Timeouts Fig 3 OpenFlow switch flow table entry fields The matching fields section is used to match the packet with the entry according to various packet header fields When more than one entry match a packet the priority field determines the flow table entry that will be executed and the per flow table entry counters are updated The instructions section contains among other things the actions that will be acted upon the matched packet The timeouts field specifies the maximum amount of hard time and idle time before the flow table entry expires A zero value in any of them disable the corresponding timer The hard timeout determines the maximum amount of time in seconds before the flow table entry expires while the idle time out causes the expiration of the entry if it has matched no packet in the given number of seconds The cookie field is used by th
12. der to simplify the choice for other researchers considering the implementation of OpenFlow projects These tests showed that there are differences in performance for the controllers that support OpenFlow 1 0 and OpenFlow 1 3 Furthermore the tested controllers differs in the applications they support Keywords Software Defined Network OpenFlow Emulation Mininet 1 Introduction A new paradigm in the field of networking is the software defined networks a promising architecture which is gaining rapid attention of researchers and vendors as well 1 3 This is so because the unlimited development of network applications and the extensive demands of an explosive growth in network users are driving conventional network devices to their limits SDN introduces a new way to handle the vast amount of packets traversing the network Many packets belong to a single flow thus handling that flow and distributing the actions to be taken to all its packets would numerously speed up their forwarding This is only one of many other benefits of a centralized control of the network The most widely deployed SDN architecture is the OpenFlow protocol Many gigantic Internet vendors including Google are considering the application of OpenFlow protocol in their data centers 4 A gradual implementation of SDN and OpenFlow suggests the co existence of OpenFlow networks with conventional networks This requires extensive studies and projects to investigate th
13. der to test network performance many benchmarks could be used The following are examples for benchmarks 7 3 1 OF test It is a framework and collection of testes for validating OpenFlow switches OFtest provides a connection as a controller to the OpenFlow switch and send messages to test OpenFlow basic functionalities It supports OpenFlow specification versions 1 0 1 3 21 OFtest uses Python and Scapy as a pre requisites where Scapy is a powerful interactive packet manipulation program used to decode packets match requests with replies It also can handle tasks like scanning and trace routing 36 7 3 2 OF lops It is an OpenFlow testing platform used to focus on OpenFlow protocol behavior by implementing basic measurement tests that allow developers to specify and study the capabilities of OpenFlow devices 37 OF lops tests are used to assess performance of OpenFlow switches in network by utilizing multi threading parallelism 21 OFlops has features of modularity low overhead with minimum delay in processing to support parallelism and heterogeneity by being compatible with a number of packet 81 Mohammed Basheer Al Somaidai and Estabrak Bassam Yahya Survey of Software Components to Emulate OpenFlow Protocol as an SDN Implementation generation and capturing tools such as Cbench and Wireshark 7 3 3 Chench It is a program for testing OpenFlow controllers by generating packet in messages and waits for flow mo
14. ds messages to receive Cbench has two emulated modes latency mode and throughput mode Cbench can be used to measure controller performance by changing its arguments such as number of switches number of MACs per switch hosts number of tests and time of test 7 Cbench supports OpenFlow 1 0 only but the Mul controller vender Kulcloud introduced a modified version of Cbench that supports OpenFlow 1 3 and is called Kcbench albeit it worked with Mul controller only in our test 7 4 Linux Kernel Programs Because Mininet emulator uses Linux kernels it supports a number of Linux programs and commands such as Dump Ping Pingall Iperf and plot programs like Gnuplot program which supports many types of plots in 2D and 3D The Dump command illustrates network nodes with their interfaces connections Ping and Pingall test network connectivity and latency Iperf determines bandwidth utilization and retransmission of packets in TCP applications It also measures loss and jitter for UDP applications 7 5 Frenetic Frenetic is a domain specific language used to program software defined networks 38 It has features of high level abstractions Therefore it is useful to replace the low level interfaces available today Frenetic offers a suite of information about network state identity forwarding policies and updating policies 39 7 6 Wireshark Mininet supports Wireshark packet analyzer and uses it to capture packets travers
15. e controller to filter flow statistics flow modification and flow deletion Each flow table must support a table miss flow entry clarifying the action that should be taken upon the unmatched packet either sending it to the controller dropping it or directing it to the subsequent flow table in the pipeline 12 OpenFlow protocol has three types of messages to communicate between the controller and the OpenFlow switch over a secure channel or over a TCP channel as shown in Fig 4 They are classified according to the initiator of the message into controller to switch messages asynchronous switch to controller messages and symmetric messages The controller to switch messages are used to assert its control upon the switch reading the switch status and modifying the switch states which includes editing the switch flow tables The switch to controller messages are used to inform the controller about a new incoming flow a change in a switch state or a request for modifying a flow table entry Either the controller or the switch could initiate the symmetric messages They include hello messages echo messages error messages and experimenter message that identify the vendor of the controller or the switch 12 Table 1 shows a summary of OpenFlow switch standards specification properties It can be observed that almost every year there is a new version in the 1 x numbering of the standard and although OpenFlow protocol is still in its 1 x
16. e limitations and possibilities of these protocols Simulation and emulation of network projects provide a solid base to determine their pros and cons Emulation is more realistic than simulation since it must be carried out in real time and could provide a way to some real devices running real operating systems to interact with some simulated devices 5 B Lantz et al 6 analyzed the performance of Mininet emulator to develop interact with and customize the SDN concept with OpenFlow protocol This study showed Mininet ease of use scalability and limitations S Wang et al 5 introduced the EstiNet OpenFlow network simulator and emulator and studied its performance to design SDN networks They compared EstiNet behavior capabilities and scalability with Mininet and ns 3 platforms A Shalimov et al 7 proposed a method to test and compare popular open source SDN OpenFlow controller They analyzed throughput latency scalability and security by developing new framework called Hcprobe based on Cbench framework B Nunes et al 8 provided historic review about programmable network idea from its beginning time down to the SDN revolution The study presented the architecture of SDN and discussed OpenFlow features application and related software to deploy and develop SDN networks based on OpenFlow A Lara et al 9 discussed the architecture of OpenFlow 75 Mohammed Basheer Al Somaidai and Estabrak Bassam Yahya
17. e the network nodes and analyze these packets to study performance of the network and obtain statistical measurements about its behavior 40 OpenFlow messages could be displayed and studied using Wireshark Wireshark version 1 11 and above supports a new filter for OpenFlow 1 3 packets 8 Conclusions and Future Works Many SDN protocols are available now but employing the OpenFlow protocol is highly recommended due to its open source nature rapid development and wide deployment The proper use of emulation software components in developing OpenFlow and SDN projects would save a lot of time and money compared to practical testbeds since real hardware devices are still expensive and support primitive versions of OpenFlow standard only In this paper we examined many software components related to OpenFlow protocol Most of them were downloaded installed and operated successfully OpenDaylight Floodlight and OFSoftSwitchl13 proved to have good properties like good documentation and flexibility Observing the rapid development of OpenFlow standards predicts that a major breakthrough is expected in version 2 0 but for the time being the use of software components that supports version 1 3 like NOX OpenDaylight and Mul is recommended since no software component supports the new 1 4 version yet Most of the tested software components are standalone components The need for a frame that gather the installation and operation of switch
18. eFlow https sites google com site routeflow Open vSwitch http openvswitch org A Clemm and R Wolter network embedded management and applications understanding programmable networking infrastructure Springer New York 2013 OpenFlow 1 3 Tutorial available at https github com CPqD ofsoftswitch 1 3 wiki OpenFlow 1 3Tutorial LINC https github com FlowForwarding LINC Switch Indigo https github com floodlight indigo Avior https github com Sovietaced Avior Scapy http www secdev org projects scapy OFLops user manual available at http archive openflow org wk images 3 3e Manual pdf Frenetic http www frenetic lang org overview php N Foster M Freedman A Guha R Harrison N Katta C Monsanto J Reich M Reitblatt J Rexford C Schlesinger A Story D Walker Languages for software defined networks IEEE Communications Magazine vol 51 pp 128 134 February 2013 R Shimonski Analyzing and Troubleshooting Network Traffic Elsevier Inc 1st ed 2013
19. es and controllers into a single platform with a certain GUI and benchmark would facilitate the development of OpenFlow projects EstiNet is a good example of such a platform An emulation projects to test the compatibility of OpenFlow protocol with WLAN and IPv6 deployment is under consideration by the researchers References 1 M Mendonca B Nunes K Obraczka and T Turletti Software defined networking for heterogeneous networks IEEE COMSOC MMTC E Letter United States vol 8 no 3 pp 36 39 May 2013 2 S Jain A Kumar S Mandal J Ong L Poutievski A Singh S Venkata J Wanderer J Zhou M Zhu J Zolla U Holzle S Stuart and A Vahdat B4 experience with a globally deployed software defined WAN SIGCOMM 13 Hong Kong China pp 3 14 August 2013 3 D Drutskoy E Keller and J Rexford Scalable network virtualization in software defined networks IEEE Internet Computing vol 17 pp 20 27 March April 2013 4 Migration Working Group Migration use cases and methods Open Networking Foundation ONF February 2014 5 S Wang C Chou and C Yang EstiNet OpenFlow network simulator and emulator IEEE Communications Magazine vol 51 pp 110 117 September 2013 6 B Lantz B Heller and N McKeown A network in a lap top rapid prototyping for software defined networks In Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks New York 2010 7 A Shalimo
20. l Network Description SDN version is an online GUI used to form network topology and configure node properties link type and properties setup switches flow table entries and export network topology and its configuration as a Python script to Mininet emulator and OpenFlow controllers or as a C script to ns 3 simulator 16 7 2 3 Avior Avior is a GUI used with floodlight controller It provides features of eliminating dependency on using Python script and API in order to manipulate network and monitoring its behavior 35 Avior has flow manager tools and could give a summery about controllers switches and hosts Controllers summery provides information about host names JVM memory bloat and other controllers information Switches summery provides information about port counters match header fields and switch flow entries add delete On the other hand host summery provides information about the attached switch Data Path ID DPID and the switch port connect to it 21 7 2 4 Web User Interface UI It is one of the GUI used with some controllers such as Floodlight and OpenDaylight It is an online GUI where user can access it after installing and running the controller using the URL address http localhost 8080 Web UI displays topology of network run in Mininet network node switches hosts information such as IP MAC and DPID flows outline and add remove switches flow tables entries etc 7 3 Benchmarks In or
21. lti controllers could establish communication with a forwarding device switch provided that only one of them has the master role upon the switch and the others should be in the slave role Having multiple controllers improves reliability as the switch can continue to operate in OpenFlow mode if one controller or controller connection fails The hand over between controllers is entirely managed by the controllers themselves which enable fast recovery from failure and controllers load balancing 12 Many software implementations of the controller are summarized in Table 3 5 1 NOX NOX controller was the original controller of OpenFlow It is written in C language and its first version provided an API for Python scripts but last version of NOX has dropped this API and supported C only NOX provides a high level programmable interface upon forwarding devices and applications It is designed to support both small networks of a few hosts and large enterprise networks of hundreds of switches and hosts NOX s core has features of fast asynchronous I O topology discovery host tracking possibility and learning switch feature 20 NOX combined with Mininet provides a platform for academic research in networking 21 It supports now many features of OpenFlow protocol specification 1 3 but the researchers when implement this version discovered the Iperf command which determine the bandwidth utilization does not work properly 5 2 POX
22. n campus networks SIGCOMM Comput Commun Rev vol 38 no 2 pp 69 74 March 2008 Open Networking Foundation ONF Open networking foundation Available at https www opennetworking org images stories downloads about onf what why pdf Tech and Trains available at http gregorygee wordpress com category miniedit Visual Network Description VND available at http www ramonfontes com visual network description EstiNet Technologies Inc The GUI user Manual for the EstiNet 8 0 Network Simulator and Emulator January 2013 T Dietz Trema tutorial NEC Corporation March 2012 Available at http www fp7 ofelia eu assets Uploads 201203xx TremaT utorial pdf accessed on 23 3 2014 Z Cai A Cox T Eugene Ng Maestro balancing fairness latency and throughput in the OpenFlow control plane Rice University Technical Report TR11 07 2011 NOX http www noxrepo org nox about nox S Azodolmolky Software Defined Networking with OpenFlow Packt Publishing Ist ed October 2013 30 31 32 33 40 41 POX http www noxrepo org pox about pox Floodlight http www projectfloodlight org floodlight OpenDaylight http www opendaylight org software Ryu http osrg github 10 ryu Mul http sourceforge net projects mul Beacon https openflow stanford edu display Beacon Home FlowvisorExecise https github com onstutorial onstutorial wiki Flowvisor Exercise Rout
23. nsists of three major components a controller an OpenFlow switch and the OpenFlow protocol The Open Networking Foundation ONF a non profit Application Application layer Control and Management plane Data forwarding plane Forwarding link Controller Switch Interface Applications Controller Interface Fig 1 Architecture of a software defined network organization was created in 2011 by a group of vendors 14 It is dedicated to coordinating the development of SDN standards and solutions in order to accelerate the delivery of SDN products services and applications Since then ONF had published each new version of OpenFlow standard Up to the date of writing this paper March 2014 the last version of OpenFlow switch specification is 1 4 and it was published in October 2013 12 According to this specification the architecture of an OpenFlow switch should contain the blocks shown in Fig 2 each OpenFlow switch contains one or more flow tables processed in pipeline a single group table a single meter table and a various types of ports Each table and port in the OpenFlow switch is associated with many counters that could gather various statistics describing the events that the switch is subjected to The controller creates all the tables and their entries the data packets that traverse the OpenFlow switch update the counters The corner stone in the OpenFlow protocol is the flow table which h
24. o Yes Yes Yes Yes Meter table No No No Yes Yes VLAN and MPLS Tag No Yes Yes Yes Yes Controller connection failer Emerg ency Stand alone Stand alone secure Stand alone Stand alone IPv6 support No No Yes Yes Yes Multiple controller No No Yes Yes Yes Eviction Vacancy Synchronization No No No No Yes Optical ports No No No No Yes ie Mohammed Basheer Al Somaidai and Estabrak Bassam Yahya Survey of Software Components to Emulate OpenFlow Protocol as an SDN Implementation Table 2 Properties of SDN platforms Platform Mininet EstiNet ns 3 Trema Last version DOF 8 0 3 19 0 4 6 fi l i Vendor or onnen EstiNet Technologies Inc ns 3 Project NEC Corporation ON Lab Web site www mininet org www estinet com ote TERS io trema Trema github GNU Linux E l Operating system Ubuntu Fedora eee Windows FreeBSD Mac SSC opi ane Fedora 14 17 Fedora OSX OpenFlow versions 1 0 1 3 MO T ea 2 0 89 1O 3 LM GUI VND Miniedit EstiNet GUI VND VND Emulation mode Yes Yes No Yes Simulation mode No Yes Yes No Free Proprietary Free Proprietary Free Free VND Visual Network Description to be mentioned in section 7 4 1 Mininet Mininet is a network emulation platform that supports rapid development in SDN using OpenFlow protocol It is the most popular SDN platform used by SDN researchers due to its simplicity availability and flexibility Furthermore Mininet is entirely devoted to OpenFlow architecture
25. troller such as NOX POX or Floodlight without modifications This is why ns 3 has implemented its own OpenFlow controller as a C module with a different performance from the above real controllers Another drawback of using ns 3 is that it until now supports version 0 89 of OpenFlow protocol only this limits the researchers ability to test and develop projects that are compatible with the new versions of OpenFlow protocol 5 It could be used to introduce the concepts of SDN and OpenFlow to beginners who are used to ns 3 4 4 Trema Trema is an OpenFlow framework that includes everything the researcher needs to conduct an OpenFlow project The source tree includes basic libraries and functional modules that work as an interface to OpenFlow switches Several examples of sample applications are also provided It has an integrated testing and debugging environment that manage monitor and diagnose the entire system with a network emulator and a diagnostic tool chain Trema shark Wireshark plug in 18 The lack of a graphical user interface and the use of the programming languages C and Ruby may limit the popularity of this platform 5 Controller Software A block diagram of the controller which is the brain of any software defined network is shown in Fig 5 The controller communicates with the forwarding devices through an SDN protocol such as OpenFlow This link is also called the southbound Application Programming Interface
26. users requirements and the fast deployments of new network applications Segregating the control plane and the management plane from the data forwarding plane in network devices is what software defined network SDN about 10 11 In such a paradigm a central controller is responsible for managing many forwarding devices that lay under its supervision Such configuration would results in efficient faster innovative and more scalable networks that meet users demands Software defined network is managed through a network operating system implemented at the controller to make all the subsequent switches work in harmony and more flexibility These switches need not be in the same geographical area the management of many planet wise distributed data centers that belong to a cloud service provider is an example of this diverse distribution of forwarding devices 2 Fig 1 shows the architecture of a software defined network It is worth to mention that SDN is not a protocol but it is an operational and programming architecture Albeit SDN uses certain protocols for making the network programmable These could be OpenFlow 12 I2RS PCE P BGP LS NetConf Yong and OMI 11 In this paper we are focusing on the widely deployed OpenFlow protocol 3 Open Flow OpenFlow started at Stanford University in 2008 13 The aim of the project was to give researchers a tool to implement their experimental protocols in networks OpenFlow network co
27. v D Zuikov D Zimarina V Pashkov and R Smeliansky Advanced study of SDN OpenFlow controllers CEE SECR 13 Proceedings of the 9th Central amp Eastern European Software Engineering Conference in Russia November 2013 8 B Nunes M Mendonca X Nguyen K Obraczka and T Turletti A survey of software defined networking past present and future of programmable networks IEEE Communications Surveys amp Tutorials in press January 2014 9 A Lara A Kolasani and B Ramamurthy Network innovation using OpenFlow a survey IEEE Communications Surveys amp Tutorials vol 16 pp 493 512 February 2014 American Journal of Software Engineering and Applications 2014 3 6 74 82 82 Open Network Foundation ONF Software defined networking the new norm for networks April 2012 Available at https www opennetworking org images stories downloads openflow wp sdn newnorm pdf accessed on 23 3 2014 T Nadeau and K Gray SDN Software Defined Networks Ist ed O Reilly Media Inc August 2013 Open Network Foundation ONF OpenFlow switch specification version 1 4 0 wire protocol 0x05 October 2013 Available at https www opennetworking org images stories downloads sdnrsources onf specifications openflow openflow spec v1 4 0 pdf accessed on 23 3 2014 N McKeown T Anderson H Balakrishnan G Parulkar L Peterson J Rexford S Shenker and J Turner Openflow enabling innovation i
28. works Ryu controller includes event management in memory state management application management and series of reusable libraries e g NetCOONF library sFlow NetFlow library and OF Config library Additionally it supports applications such as OpenStack Quantum layer 2 switch Generic Routing Encapsulation tunnel interface GRE and tunnel abstractions As well as services about topology and statistics 11 5 6 Mul Mul is an OpenFlow SDN controller and it uses C based multi threaded infrastructure at its core and it is designed to provide good services and ensure reliability through the network 26 Mul supports OpenFlow 1 3 land did not work in our test with OpenFlow 1 3 switches such as Open vsSwitch 5 7 Beacon Beacon is an OpenFlow SDN controller and it uses Java based API Beacon has features of rapid development fast and dynamic performance in order to code bundle features 27 5 8 Special Purpose Controllers There is a type of controllers that operates with general purpose controllers such as FlowVisor and RouteFlow 21 FlowVisor acts as a proxy between an OpenFlow switch and multi controllers So that it directs the first packet of a new flow to the appropriate controller according to application port MAC or IP address This would results in the separation of the network or applications into slices where OpenFlow versions GUI Operating system 1 0 1 3 NOX GUI Linux 10 NOX GUI Linux Windows Mac
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