Network Monitoring in Software-Defined Networking: A Review

Monitoring is an important concept in network management as it helps network operators to determine the behavior of a network and the status of its components. Traffic engineering, quality of service, and anomaly detection also depend on monitoring for decision making. Software-defined networking (SDN) is becoming increasingly popular for network provision and management tasks. This paper surveys the tasks and challenges associated with SDN, providing an overview of SDN monitoring developments. Several design concepts, research directions, and open issues are also discussed.

I. Introduction

The purpose of network monitoring is to support proper management operations [1] . Monitoring provides a view of the network status and illustrates network behavior, which is a basis for further management operations such as traffic engineering [2], quality of service (QoS) [3], and anomaly detection [4] . In computer networks, the operation model [5] is a stackable architecture with different layers, linking numerous hosts for data exchange. To satisfy various management purposes, network monitoring helps network operators to obtain operation and usage statistics.