A proposal of policy based OpenFlow network management

Abstract

The OpenFlow architecture is a proposal from the Clean Slate initiative to define a new Internet architecture where the network devices are simple, and the control and management plane is performed by a centralized controller. The simplicity and centralization architecture makes it reliable and inexpensive. However enterprise network administrators are not familiar with this new concept of network management and there is a shortage of tools that simplify the task of manage a OpenFlow network using a simple interface. The concept of policies is easier to grasp than the concept of OpenFlow flows, because companies use policy to express employee rights and duties in a particular context. This paper proposes a Policy Based OpenFlow Network Management (PBONM) framework to manage the OpenFlow networks using the policies definition language like Ponder to define OpenFlow flows of easy way for the network administrators.