On the accuracy of leveraging SDN for passive network measurements

Network Measurement has emerged as one promising field of application for Software Defined Networking. The reason for this is that the logically centralized control plane of an SDN network inherently has to aggregate network state information in order to function. This circumstance can be leveraged for network measurements at the SDN controller without the need for additional equipment or active - and possibly disruptive - measurements in the network itself. However, the accuracy and potential resource overhead of this approach has not been discussed. In this paper we compare an SDN-based solution to actual traffic measurements in order to determine its accuracy and resource demand by performing tests in an OpenFlow testbed.