A High Level Rule-based Language for Openflow: A Proof of Concept based on Floodlight

This paper proposes XML-Defined Network policies (XDNP) a new high level language based on XML notation to describe network control rules in Software Defined Network environments. We rely on existing OpenFlow controllers specifically Floodlight but the novelty of this project is to separate complicated languageand framework-specific APIs from policy descriptions. This separation makes it possible to extend the current work as a northbound higher level abstraction that can support a wide range of controllers who are based on different programming languages. By this approach, we believe that network administrators can develop and deploy network control policies easier and faster. Keywords—Software Defined Networks; Openflow; Floodlight; SDN compiler; SDN programming languages; SDN abstraction.