OpenGUFI: An Extensible Graphical User Flow Interface for an SDN-Enabled Wireless Testbed

In this paper, the authors propose an extensible (Open) Graphical User (Flow) Interface called OpenGUFI. OpenGUFI is a Software-Defined Networking application that provides a visual abstraction of the underlying network. The Visualizer has been implemented and tested in an SDN-enabled Wireless Testbed based on the Odin framework. As a use case a network driven handover between multiple wireless access points is used to explain how the visualizer works. OpenGUFI visualizes the following information: the real-time network topology, associations between the mobile clients and the wireless access points and traffic flows. In addition to that OpenGUFI also provides a control interface via which actions can be triggered within the network. In its current version handovers can be triggered via drag and drop gestures. With the proposed solution, a greater visibility of the wireless network via well-defined open APIs is gained and hence, another service function in the Application Plane is offered.