Carving research slices out of your production networks with OpenFlow

1. SLICED PROGRAMMABLE NETWORKS OpenFlow [4] has been demonstrated as a way for researchers to run networking experiments in their production network. Last year, we demonstrated how an OpenFlow controller running on NOX [3] could move VMs seamlessly around an OpenFlow network [1]. While OpenFlow has potential [2] to open control of the network, only one researcher can innovate on the network at a time. What is required is a way to divide, or slice, network resources so that researchers and network administrators can use them in parallel. Network slicing implies that actions in one slice do not negatively affect other slices, even if they share the same underlying physical hardware. A common network slicing technique is VLANs. With VLANs, the administrator partitions the network by switch port and all traffic is mapped to a VLAN by input port or explicit tag. This coarse-grained type of network slicing complicates more interesting experiments such as IP mobility or wireless handover. Here, we demonstrate FlowVisor, a special purpose OpenFlow controller that allows multiple researchers to run experiments safely and independently on the same production OpenFlow network. To motivate FlowVisor’s flexibility, we demonstrate four network slices running in parallel: one slice for the production network and three slices running experimental code (Figure 1). Our demonstration runs on real network hardware deployed on our production network at Stanford and a wide-area test-bed with a mix of wired and wireless technologies.