Enabling SDN application development using a NETCONF mediator layer simulator

Software Defined Networking (SDN) application development is a novel field that has emerged in the context of SDN. This new networking paradigm is intended to mitigate limitations that appeared in traditional networks, such as vendor dependency, complexity or the lack of agility. It gradually migrated through several types of networks, beginning from campus networks, to data centers, transport networks or even Internet exchange points. The SDN ecosystem is expanding, from the SDN controller perspective and both southbound and northbound, including the development of applications. This paper introduces part of the work that was done for the third Wireless Transport SDN Proof of Concept (PoC). The purpose of the PoC was demonstrating the utility of a common information model that would represent a wireless transport device, to be used for its management and configuration in the context of SDN. A simulator consisting of a NETCONF server implementation, that would emulate the management interface of a network element but only return default values for its corresponding YANG attributes (Default Values Mediator — DVM) was realized using the OpenYuma software framework. This eased the development and testing of SDN applications that were proposed and implemented for the use cases of the PoC.