BOPIS-Software: A Python based Software application for SDN East-West inter Autonomous System communication and Programmable Network Monitoring tool

The rapid growth of Internet traffic creates an expanded attack surface for cybercriminals, poses scalability issues and makes it challenging to monitor and effectively analyze the network behavior. On top of this, network virtualization enables traffic from various sources to be routed to different destinations using a single physical interface. The traditional port mirroring and network tapping is hence no longer an effective network monitoring solution because of the huge traffic to capture and store but also the impossibility to access the real traffic source: the virtual interface. By building an Internet testbed on Software Defined Networks (SDN), this paper contributes to the ongoing standardization initiatives for East-West controller communication and examines how utilizing the unseen flexibility and programmability of SDN will address the mentioned issues. This study proposes the combination of BGP, Open Flow Packet_IN and Scapy manipulation tool (BOPIS) to build a software that allows internet peering and real-time virtual network monitoring.Our results show that external BGP sessions are established between peers and a fine-grained, real-time monitoring is done up to the virtual interface level for destination IP (Intenet Protocol) addresses and BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) advertised prefixes identification.