Author(s)

Israfil Biswas¹, Mamun Abu-Tair¹, Philip Morrow¹, Sally McClean¹, Bryan Scotney¹, Gerard Parr²

¹School of Computing and Information Engineering, Ulster University, Northern Ireland, UK.
²School of Computing Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK.

Technology trends such as Software-Defined Networking (SDN) are transforming networking services in terms of flexibility and faster deployment times. SDN separates the control plane from the data plane with its centralised architecture compared with the distributed approach used in other management systems. However, management systems are still required to adapt the new emerging SDN-like technologies to address various security and complex management issues. Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is the most widespread management protocol implemented in a traditional Network Management System (NMS) but has some limitations with the development of SDN-like services. Hence, many studies have been undertaken to merge the SDN-like services with traditional network management systems. Results show that merging SDN with traditional NMS systems not only increases the average Management Information Base (MIB) polling time but also creates additional overheads on the network. Therefore, this paper proposes a dynamic scheme for MIB polling using an additional MIB controller agent within the SDN controller. Our results show that using the proposed scheme, the average polling time can be significantly reduced (i.e., faster polling of the MIB information) and also requires very low overhead because of the small sized OpenFlow messages used during polling.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN), Management Information Base (MIB), OpenFlow, Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)

Biswas, I. , Abu-Tair, M. , Morrow, P. , McClean, S. , Scotney, B. and Parr, G. (2017) A Dynamic Approach to MIB Polling for Software Defined Monitoring. Journal of Computer and Communications, 5, 24-41. doi: 10.4236/jcc.2017.55003.