Policy driven filter for network management in OpenFlow-based datacenters

OpenFlow is the principal standard employed for achieving communication between the control and data planes in a Software Defined Network (SDN) architecture. SDN is rapidly emerging as an ideal technology for datacenter implementations as it helps in mitigating low throughput and high latency issues generally faced in current designs. This work concentrates on deploying an application aware filter within a datacenter which effectively blocks requests from hosts for a certain pre-decided set of protocols. For this implementation, Mininet is adopted as a network emulator tool. The topology incorporated for the datacenter design is the Binary Tree Topology. Also a remote controller, namely POX has been integrated into the network at the control plane. It executes the policies fabricated by the network architect and rephrases higher-level logics to lower-level instructions for the switches to understand. The controller successfully blocks the requests emanating from users on the basis of the defined policies. File Transfer Protocol (FTP) has been used as an application for this work.