OpenFlow and services in the cloud: Core network demonstrator

Considering the growth of customers craving for complex services like IPTV, cloud storage, and online gaming, traditional networking is quickly becoming an obsolete technology. The new networking paradigm, Software Defined Networking (SDN), in combination with the recent communication protocol, OpenFlow, brings a new perspective to the operator and cloud provider´s core networks by providing new autonomous tools. This paper proposes and evaluates a new SDN control mechanism that allows the definition of dedicated connectivity service within an operator network, making it possible to easily provide and support cloud services to the end user. It takes advantage of the combination of SDN and Cloud Computing, and further benefits the automation of both technologies, which empowers the operator to provide faster services to its users, such as virtual machine instantiation with automatic network creation. The evaluation of the proposed approach shows that the most time consuming phase is the installation of the OpenFlow rules in the network: in a network of 128 nodes, it takes around 250msec to both install and remove connections.