Dissertação
Openvisor – framework para redes de experimentação Openflow
Autor
Powaczuk, Lucas
Institución
Resumen
OpenFlow-based testbeds have been established as an emerging field of research in order to create
experimental environments that enable the development of new technologies on real network
infrastructures. The bibliographic review showed that existing experimentation networks still lack
mechanisms to guarantee users simplified operational forms, decoupled from the physical substrate
and that are resilient. In this context, the research problem is: how to guarantee the users of OpenFlow
experimentation networks an environment that allows creating virtual networks with low complexity
in operation, flexible and resilient to link failures. The hypothesis that guided the study is that by
integrating the tools OpenVirteX and FlowVisor and, consequently of its functionalities, the resulting
framework would allow to achieving this purpose. OpenVirteX and FlowVisor are network
hypervisors with distinct functionalities where the former has the use of virtual and arbitrary
topologies, connectivity failure recovery, and absolute control. The FlowVisor has its main
contribution in providing a wide flexibility in the definition of virtual networks. Therefore, the
objective of this study was to develop a framework for OpenFlow experimentation networks, aiming
to provide flexible virtual networks to users, with low complexity of the operation, having absolute
control and resilient to failures. The study methodology is characterized by the hypothetical-deductive
method. The procedures used to develop the proposal were: create the experimentation context,
individual testing of the OpenVirteX and FlowVisor hypervisors, integration of the tools, evaluation of
the framework and, finally, analysis and discussion of the results. The study confirmed some of the
guiding hypothesis of the proposal since the framework was: Flexible, allowing to use any metrics of
the OpenFlow header for the segmentation of virtual networks; Low complexity, because it allows to
use a virtual and arbitrary topology composed of a single virtual switch corresponding to the entire
physical network; Resilient to connectivity failures, because the tool was able to redefine the
communication through of alternative routes. Regarding absolute control, the results refute the
presence of this functionality. It was observed that providing total control of the network to the user
has the impact of weakening the flexibility of the experimentation environment.