Software Defined Network for Data Center Using Open Flow Protocol

The conventional Data Center Networks (DCNs) are highlighted by the increased number of users and bandwidth requirements which in turn have many implementation limitations. The current networking devices with its control and forwarding planes coupling resulted in network architectures that are not suitable for dynamic computing and storage needs. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is introduced to change this notion of traditional networks by decoupling the control and the forwarding planes. In this paper a programmable data center network architecture using SDN based OpenFlow protocol is demonstrated to measure some of the network performance parameters such as delay and throughput and compared them to that of traditional network. In addition, the possibility of adding a Load Balancing application is also introduced for DCN using multi-POX controllers in the SDN network. Two scenarios of DCNs using tree topology are used to implement the traditional and SDN based networks. In the first, the delay performance of DCN is reduced in the SDN based network by about 15% in comparison to that of traditional network due to OpenFlow protocol and the centralized POX controller. The use of SDN slightly increases the throughput when compared to traditional network with about 1.7 Mbit/sec.. In the second scenario; a load balancing application is implemented in tree DCN/SDN network topology using two POX controllers to handle traffic distribution among many servers. This leads to better resource utilization as a result of using SDN.