OpenFlow Network Visualization Software with Flow Control Interface

Recently, the concept of Software-Defined Network (SDN), which allows us to administer and configure a network in a centralized and software-programming manner, has gathered network engineers´ and researchers´ attention rapidly. In particular, the expectation and concern to OpenFlow as an implementation of the SDN is remarkable. As a result, research activities, which include prototyping, implementation, demonstration and experiments, conducted over OpenFlow networks have been a worldwide tendency. In such research activities, however, the difficulty in understanding network topology, traffic amount and an actual path of a network flow on the OpenFlow network, and the intricacies in debugging software designed for OpenFlow are serious problems in the development process of OpenFlow controller. This research aims to realize a visualization software that facilitates researchers to perform OpenFlow controller development and demonstration experiments performed on an actual OpenFlow network. In this paper, the authors summarize the achievement of their research work in progress as well as the future direction.