A Scalable Monitoring System for Software Defined Networks

Abstract

Monitoring functionality is an essential element of any network system. Traditional monitoring solutions are mostly used for manual and infrequent network management tasks. Software-defined networks (SDN) have emerged with enabled automatic and frequent network reconfigurations. In this paper, a scalable monitoring system for SDN is introduced. The proposed system monitors small, medium, and large-scale SDN. Multiple instances of the proposed monitoring system can run in parallel for monitoring many SDN slices. The introduced monitoring system receives requests from network management applications, collects considerable amounts of measurement data, processes them, and returns the resulting knowledge to the network management applications. The proposed monitoring system slices the network (switches and links) into multiple slices. The introduced monitoring system concurrently monitors applications for various tenants, with each tenant's application running on a dedicated network slice. Each slice is monitored by a separate copy of the proposed monitoring system. These copies operate in parallel and are synchronized. The scalability of the monitoring system is achieved by enhancing the performance of SDN. In this context, scalability is addressed by increasing the number of tenant applications and expanding the size of the physical network without compromising SDN performance.