Leveraging Net2Plan planning tool for network orchestration in OpenDaylight

The software-defined networking (SDN) paradigm brings unprecedented agility and flexibility to network operators. The usage of centralized software-based controllers simplifies operation and management and enables innovation in the control plane through network programmability. Besides, a controller may be operated via third-party applications using the so-called northbound application programming interfaces (APIs). In this paper, we report our preliminary work on the interaction between the northbound interface of the open-source industry-supported OpenDaylight controller and our Net2Plan tool. Net2Plan is an open-source network planning tool that is able to execute user-made algorithms. By connecting Net2Plan to OpenDaylight, users would be able to easily orchestrate their networks, e.g. defining flow routing, making use of built-in or user-defined algorithms, implemented in the Net2Plan framework. In this paper, we present some illustrative experiments, and discuss future challenges. © 2014 IEEE.