Lehrstuhl für Informatik III

    SOFA (funded by Deutsche Telekom Laboratories)

    System Analysis of an OpenFlow Architecture (SOFA)

    SOFA Project Team


    Prof. Dr.-Ing. Phuoc Tran-Gia,

    Dr. Rastin Pries


    Michael Jarschel,

    Daniel Schlosser


    Dr. Michael Düser (Telekom Laboratories),

    Dr. Fritz-Joachim Westphal (Telekom Laboratories),

    Dr. Andreas Gladisch (Telekom Laboratories)


    The idea of OpenFlow is to separate the data path from the control path. This means that simple forwarding still resides on the switch, whereas high-level routing decisions are done on a separate controller. This split of the switching and controlling logic enables the creation of vendor-independent intelligent control mechanisms.

    The goal of the project is to evaluate the potentials of OpenFlow for the future Internet. Various fields of application for OpenFlow are evaluated and compared to already existing approaches such as MPLS. Furthermore, different OpenFlow architectures are analyzed in terms of scalability, meaning how many flows can be handled dynamically and how to organize the switch-controller mapping. Therefore, measurement studies are performed to gather performance-relevant parameters and the interaction of the switch and the controller is evaluated.