A Platform for Monitoring Service-Level Metrics in Software Defined Networks

This paper presents and evaluates a platform for monitoring service-level metrics in OpenFlow Software Defined Networks (SDN), named SDNMon. The platform supports frequent network observation, at different granularity levels, including per-flow observation, being able to present accurate on-the-fly statistics regarding throughput and delay. The evaluation considered two statistical data gathering approaches, a proposed polling-based mechanism which collects information kept by OpenFlow counters at the network elements, and an alternate sampling-based mechanism which uses sFlow.