SDN Lab

This repository provides a software-defined networking (SDN) lab environment using Mininet, Ryu controller, and FlowManager in Docker containers. The repository also includes Python applications to forward network traffic among hosts in spine-leaf data centre topology. Another set of applications are available to collect traffic metrics from the switches and send them to three common time-series database (Graphite, Prometheus, and InfluxDB). The network stats can be viewed using Grafana.

This lab provides an example of running multiple SDN applications in a network. Each application handles a sperate set of tasks:

• flowmanager.py: views the network topology and flow tables for all switches. It also allows manual manipulation of the flow tables.
• dc_switch_1.py, dc_switch_2.py, and dc_switch_3.py: create flow entries dynamically to forward packtes across the spine-leaf topology in a manner that balances the traffic load among the spine switches using different techniques.
• monitor_graphite.py, monitor_prometheus.py, and monitor_influxd.py: collect network stats from the switches and send them to the corresponding database.

Requirements

• A Linux-based operating system (tested on Ubuntu 20.04)
• Docker and docker-compose installed on your machine

Instructions

For instructions on how to use repo for basic SDN oprtaions, consult the lab instructions. To add network monitoring capabilities, consult the monitoring instructions.