The history of OpenFlow

While developing and testing new concepts of network solutions, an academic environment has been meeting with difficuties: how to build or gain access to a real working network. Building such a network for individual purposes using previous solutions means a lot of expensive hardware investments.

Fundamental issues that need to be solved are: accessibility, mobility, network security, but also i.a. fixing BGP, multicasts, access control, mobile IP, creating a better network for data processing centres, energy management, or virtual devices mobility.

So far the basic option looked as following:

New solutions demands a lot of tests on complex and real working network. How can we get it? Devices provided so far by producers reveals plenty of drawback when used. Above all they are technologically very hard to modify. Moreover, producers block off the access to the software modifications. It demands a lot of money to build a bigger network on their base. Those issues have been disabling effective studies on new technologies of data processing and transmission.
And this is were the idea of OpenFlow appeared.