Performance Visualization of Southbound Interface in Software Defined Networking

Abstract

Software Defined Networking (SDN) makes Internet network configuration easier by separating the control plane and data plane. The control plane on the controller has information on network devices in the data plane and centrally control these devices. One of the controllers in SDN being developed is the Open Network Operating System (ONOS). ONOS provides interfaces such as Representational State Transfer (REST) Application Programming Interface (API). The ONOS core REST API provides some information from the network connected to it, such as devices, statistics, and the information in JSON file. The primary objective of this study is to develop an interface that simplifies performance monitoring through graphical representation. This involves testing the visualization with various topologies and conducting a comparative analysis of the visualization results across these topologies. The creation of the interface entails presenting statistical data, available in the form of a JSON file from the ONOS controller via the REST API, on the web interface in graphical format. The resulting visualization generates a graph that aligns with the performance characteristics of each topology, reflecting device details, ports, and additional parameters such as the count of sent and received packets, as well as sent and received bytes. The performance visualization outcomes specific to each topology are consistent with the number of connections and are prominently displayed on the web interface. Additionally, this research evaluates network throughput and bandwidth by sending ICMP packet and iperf tests across each topology. Among all the openflow tests performed on various network topologies, it was observed that the tree topology exhibited the lowest network capacity utilization, followed by the leaf-spine topology, and finally the ring topology.