An efficient scheme of bulk traffic statistics collection for software-defined networks

Along with the widespread development of Internet and mobile applications, the demand for more flexible and dynamic networking services increases. It becomes a new challenge for many carriers to deploy a variety of new services by effective provisioning of network resources. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a novel approach to make networks reconfigurable and extensible such that new services can be deployed with existing network devices. By decoupling the controller plane from the data plane in network devices, SDN brings networks programmability of the data plane and centralization of the controller plane. Conventional Operations Support Systems (OSSs) were developed to manage networks in a standard fashion with Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) or proprietary protocols. SDN provides a new framework in managing SDN-enabled devices. A new issue for carriers is how SDN-enabled networks and devices can be monitored and controlled by current OSSs. This paper focuses on performance management and aims to develop an efficient scheme to collect traffic statistics data via the SDN controller plane. Similar to Bulkstat, an SNMP-based mechanism for periodic collection and transfer of MIB objects, the proposed scheme for bulk traffic statistics collection is developed in the controller plane and provides a northbound interface for upper network management applications. Instead of using SNMP and MIBs, the scheme is implemented by periodically gathering statistics information of flow tables from SDN-enabled switches via the OpenFlow protocol.