Toward Inter-Connection on OpenFlow Research Networks

With the advance of Future Internet technologies, many research issues and ideas are growing fast in recent years. In the field of network virtualization, software defined network becomes a common topic on network research. In Taiwan, many institutes and laboratories of universities already built their bench-scale testbed for research and educational use with OpenFlow protocol. As time goes by, stitching experimental networks is a growing trend to fulfill requirements for large scale emulation. Hence, this paper revealed a progressing deployment which connects different experimental networks with centralized control policy. The objective is to build an integrated research network with a proposed solution which utilizes OpenFlow protocol to deal with the inter-connections. With a centralized controller and implemented architecture, the deployment not only solves the limitation of VLAN tag number in network but also improves the flexibility of configuration. This design could be a solution for the realistic constraints of network environment in Taiwan, and it also supports the possibility of stitching regional experimental networks for networking research.