SDN Firewall Using POX Controller for Wireless Networks

Recently, high-speed broadband services, social networking and cloud environments have increased Internet penetration significantly. Due to this, there is large amount of users data available in the Internet including personal data, enterprise data and financial data. This leads to serious threats from malicious users. Researchers have proposed various security threats for protecting this data from unknown threats. Most of the security solutions are employed on traditional networking techniques. They are very complex, and it is very difficult to manage them. Traditional networking techniques depend on manual configuration of devices. Each device may have different policy, hence leading to policy conflicts in managing the resources over network. Network security may be compromised in such case. Software-defined networking (SDSN) is a new paradigm addressing this issue. SDN provides various advantages including network wide visibility, centralized control, flexible network architecture and ease of management. The control plane (network controller) is separated from the data plane (forwarding devices). The controller is responsible for monitoring, management and controlling the behavior of the forwarding devices. OpenFlow protocol is used by the SDN controller. In this paper, we have proposed the SDN-based firewall. POX Python-based controller of SDN is used for control and management of the network. Using wireless network topology based on SDN controller, we have evaluated the performance of the network in terms of delay, TCP bandwidth and UDP jitter. Different wireless network topologies have been created for evaluating the performance.