Towards MEF services in a SDN environment

With the emergence of OpenFlow, the first Software Defined Network (SDN) communication protocol standard, it is important to understand how current centralized network management platforms can be adapted to support this new protocol. This paper demonstrates how legacy centralized management systems, and their respective network devices, can be upgraded to provide Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) and Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) services using the OpenFlow protocol. In a first step, this paper demonstrates how an OpenFlow controller can be implemented and interconnected with a proprietary centralized management system running in a Portuguese operator. In the second step, we will demonstrate how an OpenFlow agent application can be specifically designed and implemented for proprietary network equipments. The addition of the OpenFlow agent provides to the network equipment the capability to receive and translate OpenFlow configuration commands into native configuration commands, facilitating the control by generic OpenFlow controllers. The results of the tested scenarios, which comprise the establishment of MPLS tunnels with label switching, Ethernet virtual private lines and trees, show that the MEF services activation and deletion are performed in less than 10 msec.