engleski

IP address management in software-defined networks

Traditional networks consist of network devices where data and control layer are merged together, which means that decisions about network traffic management are brought into the device itself. In such an environment, creating applications for managing network devices is a big problem. The paradigm of a software-defined network is imposed as a solution for this problem. The main idea of software-defined network is to separate control layer that makes decision about forwarding from the data layer responsible for forwarding data. In the SDN (Software-defined networks), traditional network devices have been replaced by devices for forwarding data stream and competent controllers. This is the result of the separation of the control and data layer, and the result is logically centralized network management. One of the controllers is Cisco's APIC-EM (Application Policy Infrastructure Controller Enterprise Module), which greatly facilitates monitoring and network management. The APIC-EM controller is managed by an application consisting of 8 modules. They provide insight into network devices, their topology, network performance measurement, traffic flow analysis, etc. As part of the master thesis, a "ComWan" application has been developed that provides network management using the APIC-EM controller. Compared to Cisco's application, ComWan has several new modules. One of them is an IP address management module (IPAM) that should solve the problem of using often inconsistent Excel tables by network administrators. The module consists of a hierarchical IP address representation, subdivided into a subnet. Each subnet contains a list of free and busy IP addresses. Since the controller has insight into all busy and free addresses, the problem of inconsistency has been solved.

SDN ; APIC-EM ; controller ; ComWan ; IP address ; IPAM module

nije evidentirano