Design and Implementation of MPLS SDN Controller Application based on OpenDaylight

Abstract

This paper discusses design and implementation of SDN Controller application in a Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) network based on OpenDaylight. In this paper, we first briefly review Traffic Engineering challenges in MPLS networks. We then discuss on how Software-Defined Networking (SDN) could overcome Label Switched Path (LSP) path calculation challenges in MPLS Traffic Engineering. We discuss that a centralized SDN Controller has network-wide visibility thus should become “source of truth” of network state. We discuss that OpenDaylight has capabilities as centralized SDN Controller, however one needs to build application on top of OpenDaylight. An application of SDN Controller based on OpenDaylight is proposed in this paper. To verify the application functionalities, a virtual lab is created to model an MPLS network and an OpenDaylight SDN Controller. A performance measurement of the OpenDaylight SDN Controller is also discussed in this paper.