Creating of research traffic
Using an OpenFlow controller enables to slice traffic and separate a part of already-existing network so it may be used for research.
In practice such technology demands control functions to be passed to the controllers. The controller decides about the cache flow, while switches executes the instructions given by the controller only (they have no information about network topology). When a network works in OpenFlow mode, the physical infrastructure can be divided into independent slices, in both aspects of sending packets by the switch and tracing the paths by the controller.