Interactive monitoring, visualization, and configuration of OpenFlow-based SDN

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging paradigm that arguably facilitates network innovation and simplifies network management. However, in the context of SDN, management activities, such as monitoring, visualization, and configuration can be considerably different from traditional networks. An SDN controller, for example, can be customized by network administrators according to their needs. Such customizations might pose an impact on resource consumption and traffic forwarding performance, which is difficult to assess without an SDN-devoted management system. In this paper, we initially present an analysis of control traffic in SDN aiming to better understand the impact of the communication between the controller and forwarding devices. Afterwards, we propose an interactive approach to SDN management through monitoring, visualization, and configuration that includes the administrator in the management loop. To show the feasibility of our approach a prototype has been developed. The results obtained with this prototype show that our approach can help the administrator to better understand the impact of configuring SDN-related parameters on the overall network performance.