FlowMap: Improving network management with SDN

Abstract

Network management is one of the biggest challenges in operating the Internet network today. This is mainly due to its complexity and inflexibility, which result from the tight coupling of the control plane and data plane. Efforts to address this challenge have led to the introduction of Software Defined-Networking (SDN), an emerging architecture in which a logical single controller controls the behaviour of the whole network. This paper presents a solution that exploits the separation to simplify many management tasks. Our work is based on RouteFlow, a framework that enables IP routing and virtualization in OpenFlow networks. We extend the framework to allow live migration of virtual topologies to new physical infrastructure in order to simplify management tasks such as planned maintenance. Our evaluation in emulated environments shows that the proposed system is capable of performing live migration operation with little impacts on network traffic.