Panorama: Real-time bird's eye view of an OpenFlow network
Ankit Gangwal, Mauro Conti, Manoj Singh Gaur · 2017
Software Defined Network (SDN) is an emerging networking paradigm that has gained enormous attention from the industries as well as the research community. SDN decouples data plane and control plane. The direct programmability of the control plane allows us to develop routing algorithms, which can accommodate versatile requirements of diverse network applications. On another side, Quality-of-Service provisioning, traffic engineering, etc., require accurate traffic measurements because an up-to-date view of the network facilitates service providers to optimize network performance. Existing approaches of traffic measurements demand either additional resources or alteration to infrastructure. In this paper, we present a collection of lightweight mechanisms for obtaining real-time network information in SDN environment. In particular, our mechanisms aim to obtain per-flow and per-port traffic statistics, topology information, data transfer rate for each network link, etc. Since our approach exploits the built-in capabilities of OpenFlow protocol, it does not require any changes to the infrastructure. We also implemented our proposed mechanisms and developed Panorama, a graphical user interface for real-time presentation of the obtained information.