With the vigorous development of China’s internet network in recent years, various network equipment suppliers have continuously increased their technological input and produced network equipment that can support more functions and provide better services to improve the current network system. However, the complexity and scalability issues of traditional network architecture, as well as the increasing demand for flexibility and innovation, have prompted people to seek a new network architecture and management paradigm. Moreover, research on network management has important academic significance in the field of network technology. With the continuous development of SDN (Software-Defined Networking), NFV, AI and other technologies, designing a flexible, efficient, automated and intelligent network management method that can adapt to complex and dynamically changing network environments is of great theoretical and practical significance in solving the above problems.
Therefore, we combined SDN’s characteristics with traditional network management systems and designed a SDN-based network management system with OpenDayLight open source project, RESTCONF technology, and OpenFlow protocol to achieve unified scheduling control and real-time monitoring of network resources.
This B/S-based network management system is mainly divided into five layers (physical resource layer, virtual resource layer, RESTful API interaction layer, data access layer, management layer). Through code development of OpenDayLight controller and Mininet module, we focused on designing three modules for this system: topology management module, traffic management control module, configuration management module in RESTful API interaction layer and data access layer. In the topology management module, we implemented topology discovery and fast construction of the network topology map. In the traffic management control module，we focus on monitoring and viewing network traffic while realizing real-time monitoring in an established topology environment. In configuration management module，we could complete node configuration including configuring basic information nodes，and interfering with networks by operating controllers to issue flow tables.
This paper introduces the analysis and design process of this SDN-based network management system including requirement analysis，overall architectural design，function design through detailed exposition by displaying system architecture diagrams and flowcharts, testing the system’s operation process through real screenshots, analyzing the direction of technology development, and predicting future system development.
Keywords: Software-Defined Networking (SDN), OpenDayLight, OpenFlow, RESTCONF.
