INVESTIGATION OF SOFTWARE DEFINED NETWORK FOR VIRTUAL PRIVATE NETWORKS

Abstract

The traditional networks face so many problems including: time-consuming, Multi-vendor environments require a high level of expertise and complicate network segmentation, inconvenience and difficulty of learning to manage such a huge systems and devices and more. Software-defined network continues to be one of the most hyped technology evolutions in information and communication technology that provide a centralized management of the network controlled by one controller and it promise to offer an easy to manage, scalable and high performance networks. In this study, Mininet simulator and python programming language are used to emulate a software defined network for an Internet service provider in two different models and implement virtual private local area network service networks for three customers-two sites per customer, then begin to scale the network by double the number of sites per every customer using different scenarios in every model in order to evaluate the connectivity and performance of the software defined network controller by observing the number of flows in the flow table that the controller used in data transfer and we observed that: as we scale the network by double the flow table number be scale approximately by three times as in the first model or one and half time as in the next model. Which means that the scalability problem takes place also in SDN networks and it needs more studies.