Novel Infrastructure Quantification for Utility of Virtualized Network Debugging using OpenFlow as Visualization of Packets and Software Defined Networking

Network debugging is time and resource consuming due to limited access and monitoring mechanisms. Such mechanisms may involve polling and/or active notification methods, where a failed network device may obscure the flow of poll responses in the network. We developed a network debugging mechanism facilitating the virtualization of a monitoring system through implementation of an extension to Wireshark, while leveraging the software-defined network principles of control and data plane separation. We provide translation mechanism though wireshark entries for filtering and zooming into flows of interest on specific ports with a global view of the network using OpenFlow protocol as the filtering switch for span traffic. Furthermore, we also created a utility of deployment function for a network debugging scheme to evaluate the usability of locations and numbers of flow-separation based analysis nodes. We applied our evaluation method on a typical enterprise network such as University of Houston. Our utility function can provide a usability and effectiveness metric for such debugging features around the network to better realize visualization of most relevant traffic.