Design and Implementation of an Experimental Teaching Scheme for the Development of SDN Northbound Applications

This paper presents a novel experiment teaching scheme for the control plane development of northbound applications in software defined networking (SDN). This scheme is designed to support the experiments of two commonly-used network applications, i.e., load balancing and network function virtualization. It is deployed on a virtual simulation experiment environment, which can be easily established in a timely manner. We have successfully integrated this experiment teaching scheme into the course of SDN in our university. With the support of this scheme, we not only provide students with meaningful practical guidance to learn northbound applications, but also help them better understand the programmable connotation of SDN. Furthermore, students can exploit the advantages of SDN to deploy new network services based on our proposed scheme, such that their ability of building practical and innovative network applications is enhanced.