A High-Level Rule-based Language for Software Defined Network Programming based on OpenFlow

TL;DR

This paper introduces XDNP, an XML-based high-level language for SDN policy definition that abstracts controller-specific APIs, enabling easier and faster policy development across diverse OpenFlow controllers.

Contribution

The paper presents XDNP, a novel high-level language that separates policy descriptions from controller-specific APIs, facilitating extensibility and ease of use in SDN environments.

Findings

XDNP simplifies SDN policy development.

It supports multiple controllers with different APIs.

The approach enhances flexibility and usability.

Abstract

This paper proposes XML-Defined Network policies (XDNP), a new high-level language based on XML notation, to describe network control rules in Software Defined Network environments. We rely on existing OpenFlow controllers specifically Floodlight but the novelty of this project is to separate complicated language- and framework-specific APIs from policy descriptions. This separation makes it possible to extend the current work as a northbound higher level abstraction that can support a wide range of controllers who are based on different programming languages. By this approach, we believe that network administrators can develop and deploy network control policies easier and faster.