MonSamp: an SDN Application for QoS Monitoring

Software Defined Networks are intended to be less complex, more flexible, and free of vendor-lock-ins. Therefore the Software Defined Networking (SDN) instantiation OpenFlow has been designed according to these properties. The efforts are expected to result in lower expenditure and operational costs. To reach these objectives, mechanisms of classical networks that provide established functionalities have to be revalued and either transformed or redesigned from scratch to take advantage from SDNs. In this paper we describe our vision on flow sampling suitable for traffic monitoring in those networks. Without the loss of generality our approach was specifically created to monitor the quality of service for flows. We describe monitoring as one of possibly many applications that communicate with the SDN controller via the SDN Northbound API. We implemented a prototype SDN application called MonSamp and performed tests to demonstrate the feasibility of our concept. Keywords—SDN, QoS Monitoring, SDN Application, Flow Sampling, Northbound API