OF2NF: Flow monitoring in OpenFlow environment using NetFlow/IPFIX

Gathering network flow statistics is nowadays considered to be an essential part of network monitoring activities. OpenFlow based networks although built around the concept of network flows do not natively support exporting flow statistics. This paper investigates the potential for efficient traffic flow monitoring in the OpenFlow networks and relevant monitoring information export over the well-known NetFlow/IPFIX protocols so that existing NetFlow analyzing applications can be reused. The result of the research is the OF2NF application which is implemented on a top of the OpenFlow controller and which can be used in various OpenFlow environments. Experimental results show very good matching between the statistics gathered by NetFlow and results obtained from OF2NF.