FloodSight: A Visual-Aided Floodlight Controller Extension for SDN Networks

Abstract

The Software Defined Networking (SDN) is considered as a primary evolutionary direction for the next generation networks. The OpenFlow protocol enabling SDN decouples the control plane from the data plane, thus complex controlling and management functions are able to be eliminated from switches, resulting in dumb switches with fewer layers and higher forwarding efficiency. Sophisticated controlling and management functions seen in traditional switches are moved to dedicated controllers in an SDN environment. Therefore, controllers play an important role in SDN. Floodlight is a widely used and most accepted controller, which offers a variety of useful functions. However, Floodlight lacks several key features needed in a simulation-oriented SDN environment, especially the GUI-aided configurations. To tackle there problems, we propose FloodSight (Floodlight with Sight) in this paper to assist network administrators and researchers to efficiently prototype and test an SDN network with visual support. FloodSight is a visual-aided Floodlight extension based on Floodlight’s REST APIs. The current version of FloodSight consists of 3 major components: the QoS-aware Topology Viewer, the Topology Maker and the Flow Manager, which offer visual support for QoS-aware topology viewing, topology making and flow manipulation not seen in the original Floodlight controller. The experiments on the FloodSight show that it offers desirable features and feasible performance.

This paper is supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. 2014NZYQN24), the Key Projects of the Education Department of Sichuan Province (Grant No. 15ZA0396) and the Undergraduate Training Programs for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Grant No. X201510656115 and X201510656117).