First Educational Steps in SDN Application Development

Abstract

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a new approach in design, implementation and maintenance of computer networks. With SDN, it is possible to dramatically reduce business costs because the whole network can be maintained in a centralized fashion which leads to a simplified and effective network management. This paper is concerned with SDN from educational point of view. The paper’s primary goal is to present beginning of a learning path to start experimenting with SDN programming and traffic path definition based on Hewlett-Packard (HP) SDN solution. Useful sources of documentation were selected and two experiments were performed: firstly an already existing HP SDN application was extended in the area of network visualization, secondly and experiment of traffic path definition with real network switches was performed.

Keywords

• computer network
• software defined networking
• openflow
• Hewlett-Packard