Routing-Plan duplicator: A reliable assistant for safe and seamless migration toward SDN

Recently, Software-Defined Networks (SDNs) paradigm became a very interesting area for both researchers in academia and executive-boards in industry. The main goals of SDN are to improve the network performances, to allow more flexibility in controlling and managing networks and to enrich the network services via customizable network applications. In order to migrate, partially or fully, from a traditional network toward an SDN network, the network administrators are required to guarantee the consistency of the IP addressing scheme along with the routing plan. This is to fulfill a safely transit, responding to the business or research needs. In this paper, we present a new approach allowing to restore automatically the routing plan from traditional networks based on extending a topology discovery algorithm. The gathered data are then used to configure automatically the SDN routing applications through the exposed REST APIs. The proposed solution ensures a seamless and reliable layer-three migration, which saves time and prevents human errors.