A Dynamic Approach to MIB Polling for Software Defined Monitoring

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 to the distributed approach used in other management systems. However, management sys- tems are still required to adapt the new emerging SDN-like technologies to address various security and complex management issues. Simple Network Management Pro- tocol (SNMP) is the most widespread management protocol implemented in a tradi- tional Network Management System (NMS) but has some limitations with the devel- opment 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 Manage- ment 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.