Introduction to SDN, Openflow and Mininet and Creating Custom Topologies in Mininet

摘要

Software Defined Networking is a new approach to designing, building, and managing networks that separates the network's control and forwarding planes to better optimize each. Openflow is an "Open" protocol to enable communication between a Software Controller and network elements. Openflow enables the controller to create flow table entries in the switches, and enables analysis for underlying network topologies. The Mininet provides a simple and inexpensive network test-bed for developing Openflow enabled applications. Mininet supports different topologies and the user can customize any given topology by giving a set of commands or even writing a python code for a customized topology. This document focused on studying the concept of SDN, Openflow protocol and creating topologies in Mininet. This document also suggested how a migration to SDN could benefit any organization and the kind of features offered by SDN to help service providers and data centers to move to SDN and there by suggesting to move on to SDN as early as possible.