BROAD AREA: SOFTWARE DEFINED NETWORKING

SPECIFIC FOCUS: LOAD BALANCING IN DATA CENTRE NETWORK

Guide: Mr. Nabajyoti Medhi

PROGRESS REPORT FOR FINAL YEAR PROJECT

By: Aditya Shukla, Anshuman Singh

Outline

Focus

Need for a new Network Paradigm

Limitations of Current Networking Technology

Basics of SDN

Work done

Next steps

References

Need for a new Network

Paradigm

Changing traffic patterns

The “consumerization of IT”

The rise of cloud services

Big data means more bandwidth

Limitations of current network:

Complexity that leads to stasis

Inconsistent Policies

Inability to scale

Vendor dependence

What is SDN ?

Definition : The physical separation of the

network control plane from the forwarding

plane, and where a control plane controls

several devices.

SDN is a step in the evolution towards active

and programmable networking.

SDN allows network administrators to have

programmable central control of network traffic

via a controller without requiring physical

access to the network's switches.

Communication between both

planes:

Openflow: OpenFlow is a programmable

network protocol and associated hardware

designed to effectively manage and direct

traffic by decoupling control and forwarding

layers of routing.

The OpenFlow protocol enables globally-

aware software controllers, which may be

centralized or distributed, to drive the network

edge hardware in order to create an easily

programmable identity-based overlay on top of

the traditional IP core.

Focus

To design a mechanism using which we could

load balance traffic in data centre network.

Work done

Hands-on practice in Network Virtualization

tool: Mininet & some tools which comes with it

like:

Wireshark: Packet analyser

Iperf: Data throughput analyser

Learned how to operate Floodlight controller

remotely & to connect it with a virtual network.

Work done

Experimented with different combinations of legacy & openflow switches in fat tree network to figure out best possible combination for efficiently handling data traffic.

Fat tree Network : is a popular data center network topology.

It is typically a 3-layer hierarchical tree that consists of switches on the core, aggregation and top-of-rack(ToR) layers. The hosts connect to the switches on the ToR layer.

Work done

Work done

Next Steps

We are now trying to develop a module for

iperf open source tool so as to generate

traffic between all possible pairs of hosts

automatically.

To try different types of controllers on the same

fat tree network so as to figure out most

suitable one for efficiently handling the traffic.

References

●Software Defined Networking- The new norm in Networks

https://www.opennetworking.org/images/stories/downloads/sdn-resources/white-papers/wp-sdn-

newnorm.pdf

●About Openflow

http://archive.openflow.org/wk/index.php/OpenFlow_Tutorial

●Mininet tutorial

http://mininet.org/walkthrough/