1. Ganesh H. Shankar ganesh@sdninsights.org
OFNet An Open Flow Network Emulator, Controller/SDN App Testing/ Debugging Framework.
Ganesh H. Shankar

2. Mininet
SDN Controller
Emulated Openflow Network on Laptop

3. Mininet is great.. However, it is not enough ! Challenges of SDN
Debugging is hard
Reliability – ‘ping’ isn’t good enough 
Adoption challenges
Learnings from Stanford’s OF N/W deployment (Paper – Maturing of OpenFlow and Software-Defined Networking through Deployments)
- Flow Setup Time (and short lived flows)
- Limited CPU cycles in hybrid OF switches
- Limited TCAM resources – flow setup policy – Proactive vs. Reactive

4. OFNet OFNet context – runs on a laptop SDN Controller Sniffer Debugger
Network Health Dashboard
SDN Controller
Sniffer
Emulated Openflow Network
Debugger
Traffic Generator
OFNet context – runs on a laptop

5. Easily Create Openflow N/W with arbitrary topology

6. Programmable Traffic Generator and Performance Dash Board

7. Visual Debugger – Animated spatial View of messages flow b/w controller and switches

8. Temporal View – Auto Generated Sequence Diagram of message flows b/w controller and switches

9. OFNet – Use Cases Qualitative Analysis Control plane debugging
Qualitative comparisons of different controllers
To gain confidence with near realistic deployments
Control plane debugging
Quality assurance of controller – CHO testing
Easy scripting for automated tests – not locked into a shell
Real life traffic generation beyond ping
Of course as another OF emulator – education/training

10. Future Work (when time permits)
Apache v2 licensed open source . More info here - (
(Site under construction)
Control Plane and Data plane correlation
Large L2 network – emulated networks connected using VXLAN
Large Cloud Emulation Platform
Overlay & Underlay network emulation
OF Underlay
Overlay running on VMs
Light weight VM emulation using n/w name space
Test bed for studying
Overlay – Underlay interactions (Opaque underlay criticism)
Scheduling, Performance modeling, Visibility Algorithms