SDNMP: Enabling SDN management using traditional NMS

Abstract

Network management system (NMS) is important to ensure security and efficiency of network. Traditional NMS usually adopts SNMP as management protocol and has achieved great success. However, with emerging of various services, traditional network exposes shortcomings. Software-Defined Network (SDN) is a new paradigm which separates the control plane from the forwarding plane as opposed to the distributed control of current networks. This centralized architecture can simplify the complexity of network management. Although SDN has many advantages, it still lacks mature management tools and is difficult to realize full deployment, which makes network operators reluctant to completely replace their legacy NMS. As a result, it is necessary to combine traditional NMS with SDN. This paper presents the design of SDNMP, which is an approach for managing SDN using traditional NMS. To verify our approach, we build and implement a prototype in our own testbed. By deploying virtual networks and services, results show that SDNMP works well in practice.