Abstract—Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a new norm of networks. It is designed to facilitate the way of managing, measuring, debugging and controlling the network dynamically, and to make it suitable for the modern applications. Generally, measurement methods can be divided into two categories: Active and passive methods. Active measurement method is employed to inject test packets into the network in order to monitor their behaviour (ping tool as an example). Meanwhile the passive measurement method is used to monitor the traffic for the purpose of deriving measurement values. The measurement methods, both active and passive, are useful for the collection of traffic statistics, and monitoring of the network traffic. Although there has been a work focusing on measuring traffic statistics in SDN environment, it was only meant for measuring packets and bytes rates for non-web traffic. In this study, a feasible method will be designed to measure the number of packets and bytes in a certain time, and facilitate obtaining statistics for both web traffic and non-web traffic. Web traffic refers to HTTP requests that use application layer; while non-web traffic refers to ICMP and TCP requests. Thus, this work is going to be more comprehensive than previous works. With a developed module on POX OpenFlow controller, information will be collected from each active flow in the OpenFlow switch, and presented on Command Line Interface (CLI) and wireshark interface. Obviously, statistics that will be displayed on CLI and on wireshark interfaces include type of protocol, number of bytes and number of packets, among others. Besides, this module will show the number of flows added to the switch whenever traffic is generated from and to hosts in the same statistics list. In order to carry out this work effectively, our Python module will send a statistics request message to the switch requesting its current ports and flows statistics in every five seconds; while the switch will reply with the required information in a message called statistics reply message. Thus, POX controller will be notified and updated with any changes could happen in the entire network in a very short time. Therefore, our aim of this study is to prepare a list for the important statistics elements that are collected from the whole network, to be used for any further researches; particularly, those that are dealing with the detection of the network attacks that cause a sudden rise in the number of packets and bytes like Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). Keywords—Mininet, OpenFlow, POX controller, SDN. I. INTRODUCTION DN is a new technology designed to make our network more agile. Today's networks are often quite static, slow to change and dedicated for single services. With SDN one can create a network with more services in a dynamic fashion Wisam H. Muragaa and Mohd Fadzli Marhusin are with Faculty of Science and Technology, Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia, Bandar Baru Nilai, 71800, Nilai, Malaysia (e-mail: phd.wisam@gmail.com, fadzli@usim.edu.my). Kamaruzzaman Seman is with Faculty of Engineering and Build Environment, Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia, Bandar Baru Nilai, 71800, Nilai, Malaysia (e-mail: drkzaman@usim.edu.my). allowing us to consolidate multiple services onto one common infrastructure for both service providers and carriers. The idea behind SDN is the idea of pulling the intelligence of the network away from the hardware. Decoupling the intelligence from the network hardware is achieved by separating the data plane from control plane as Open Networking Foundation (ONF) has defined [1]. Data plane or infrastructure layer is the bottom layer in SDN structure and that is where the network forwarding equipment is situated. The control layer which is the middle layer in SDN architecture is responsible for configuring the infrastructure layer; it does that by receiving a service request from the third layer which is the application layer. SDN controller is the intelligence of SDN structure; unlike the traditional networks, where the intelligence is the Network Operating System (NOS). OpenFlow controllers in SDN are logically located in control plane, which is the middle layer meant to control and manage the requests of top layer (application layer), and to instruct the bottom layer (infrastructure layer). There are several types of SDN controllers; it can be mainly categorized based on the programming language of which the controller is made and the purpose of innovation [2]. One of it is the chosen POX controller. Communications between controller and both upper and lower layers in SDN structure are done by northbound and southbound Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Northbound APIs are used to communicate between controller and the running applications over the network; while southbound APIs are responsible for the communications between controller and the packet forwarding hardware. The API presence enables the network to be directly programmable, and it gives the software developers the opportunity to develop their own APIs and applications and implements it instantly [2]. In SDN terminology, communication that occurs between control layer and forwarding layer is called southbound communication. The standard mechanism that allows them to communicate with each other is known as OpenFlow protocol. OpenFlow protocol allows the controller to have a direct access to and manipulation of the forwarding devices of data plane. OpenFlow has different versions; the one that will be used in this study is OpenFlow 1.1.0, where POX controller currently supports this version [2]-[3]. As a related work, the authors in [4] concentrate on measuring non-web traffic statistics in SDN environment. Their method collects port and flow statistics from the running switch(s) and presents these statistics on a web interface called weathermap. Their method focuses on the rate of the packets A POX Controller Module to Collect Web Traffic Statistics in SDN Environment Wisam H. Muragaa, Kamaruzzaman Seman, Mohd Fadzli Marhusin S World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology International Journal of Computer and Information Engineering Vol:10, No:12, 2016 2105 International Scholarly and Scientific Research & Innovation 10(12) 2016 scholar.waset.org/1307-6892/10006184 International Science Index, Computer and Information Engineering Vol:10, No:12, 2016 waset.org/Publication/10006184