A proposal management of the legacy network environment using OpenFlow control plane

Abstract

The Future Internet will arise from the convergence of new network concepts and combine technologies, services, media and content. It will offer flexibility and diversity with scalable content and services that are accessible through a wide range of interfaces and devices. However, the biggest challenge now is how to enable and test the proposed approaches so that they can be validated without sacrificing the current production infrastructure. The OpenFlow protocol allows production networking environments such as campus networks, metropolitan networks or R&D networks, to be used as experimental infrastructure hosting, future Internet architectures, software and protocols, in parallel with the production traffic. During rollout, there is a practical problem that arises with Legacy networks that do not support OpenFlow and need to be replaced/upgraded or refined by means of costly network re-engineering. This paper proposes a new OpenFlow architecture with new components, capable of managing Legacy-non-OpenFlow elements by offering a new solution that facilitates the management of Legacy technologies and allows them to be employed in FI experimentation environment and increase the number of experiment with the Legacy Network Environment using OpenFlow control.