NETCOM Research Group

During the SDN & OpenFlow World Congress in Düsseldorf (Germany), the European research project NetIDE, launched by IMDEA Networks and Telefonica I+D together with various important project partners, will present its first full package of the “NetIDE framework”, an integrated development environment that aims to support the whole software development lifecycle of SDN applications in a vendor- and controller-independent fashion. The presentation will be given by Dr. Pedro Aranda (Telefonica I+D), technical manager of the project, during the OpenDaylight Euro-Summit.

The NetIDE framework represents a single point of entry to SDN software development and offers a unified development environment following the ‘write once, execute anywhere’ paradigm. In the current release, NetIDE enables rapid porting of Ryu or Floodlight applications to an OpenDaylight controller, thus facilitating the migration of existing network services to an evolving software-defined infrastructure.

In detail, the release comes as a software bundle including: (i) the NetIDE Development Environment, an Eclipse-based integrated environment for developers; (ii) the NetIDE Network Engine, a controller-agnostic environment where SDN applications for different controllers can be deployed on top of the same infrastructure; (iii) a set of NetIDE Tools enabling developers to systematically test, profile, and tune their network applications (logger, garbage collector, debugger, a wireshark dissector and many others). These tools also offer considerable benefits when troubleshooting in a productive environment after application deployment.

“It is great that we are finally releasing this important outcome of the project”, declared Dr. Elio Salvadori (CREATE-NET, Italy) NetIDE project coordinator. “We strongly believe this may greatly simplify the life of many SDN software developers, who are often forced to get drop applications developed for a specific controller and re-implement everything from scratch for a different controller”. “Our presentation at the OpenDaylight Eurosummit,” added Dr. Pedro Aranda (Telefonica), “is intended to involve a wider group of early adopters, who may be willing to engage with our community and propose some more advanced topics.”

About the NetIDE project:

NetIDE is a European research project which aims to deliver a single IDE to support the whole development lifecycle of network controller programs in a vendor-independent fashion. The project is industry-driven thanks to the involvement of the key European players and market leaders Telefonica, Intel Research, Thale and Fujitsu in collaboration with Telcaria, a high-tech SME. It also involves the well-known research and academic partners University of Paderborn, IMDEA Networks, Fraunhofer and CREATE-NET.