Networking Control Education by the use of Software Defined Networking Tools and Techniques

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging field of study within computer networks research area that will, in a near future, play an important role in the design and development of network infrastructures. The main idea behind SDN is to separate the control and the data planes that arc nowadays coupled in the traditional network devices (routers, switches, etc). This separation of the control plane from the electronic that performs the actual packet switching tasks allows the former to be implemented in a physical different device and also permits to build the control strategies in a vendor and platform independent fashion, what helps to unify the different operating systems that today make it difficult to configure a complex network. The data plane (packet switching) is performed in physical devices but the control plane is implemented entirely by software, in devices that arc called controllers. Controllers communicate control schemes to the packet switching devices by means of different protocols and APIs and can also communicate and interact with higher level applications that can be developed for different tasks: from easing the management of control schemas to monitoring the network status or, as is the case in this paper, for educational purposes. The aim of the work described in this paper is to show the possibilities of using software applications embedded in SDN controllers as an Internet-based educational tools in the field of computer network control. (C) 2015, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.