Development and Integration of Educational Software Defined Networking Platform in Computer Networking Classes

Software Defined Networking is an emerging paradigm within computer network research field that will play a key role into the design and development of future network infrastructure. SDN as a technology provides a high level of abstraction by decoupling the control plane from the data plane giving the ability to network administrators and operators to “program” the network in much the same way as ordinary computer programmers write their programs in high level language such as Python, PHP, C++, C# and other. All of the network programming is carried out onto a centralized computer called a SDN controller, which connects to the data plane (hardware devices) via open standard protocols such as OpenFlow. The ever growing user demands regarding the networks and its underlying structure plays a key role in the adoption of SDN technology. Even though SDN is in its early days of development it has undergone a lot of changes during the past few years. This leads us to believe that this technology is going to be implemented into real world networks in the near future. That’s why it is important to start educating our students to be able to build, manage, maintain and control those types of networks [2].