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OpenFlow and the Floodlight OpenFlow Controller
Control Center
Conclusions
The Floodlight OpenFlow SDN controller already offers impressive performance and many applications, and the Floodlight developers are working on some interesting improvements, such as a more efficient handover in wireless networks, multipath and in-network load balancing, and application-aware traffic engineering.
Software Defined Networking provides a fast, cross-hardware, and above all, inexpensive option for implementing your own network management solutions. The Floodlight project demonstrates the potential of SDN; however, Floodlight will need a few critical new features before is truly useful in a production environment. Thus far, Floodlight offers only very limited configuration management. Virtually all of the configuration information is kept in memory only and is lost when you reboot the controller.
Additionally, Floodlight lacks a high availability mechanism. A controller failure can quickly paralyze the entire network, especially if you primarily use reactive applications. The currently available applications are still relatively young and offer only limited functionality.
Despite these issues, Floodlight is ideal for your first contact with Software Defined Networking. In combination with the MiniNet Software and Open vSwitch, which are also available for free, Floodlight makes it easy to take your first steps and develop some expertise in SDNs.
OpenFlow controllers like Floodlight are currently still in their infancy, but you can look forward to their changing the future of communication networks.
Infos
- OpenFlow project: https://www.opennetworking.org/sdn-resources/onf-specifications/openflow
- Floodlight Project: http://www.projectfloodlight.org
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