Showing papers on "Software-defined networking published in 2016"
TL;DR: In this article, the authors survey the state-of-the-art in NFV and identify promising research directions in this area, and also overview key NFV projects, standardization efforts, early implementations, use cases, and commercial products.
Abstract: Network function virtualization (NFV) has drawn significant attention from both industry and academia as an important shift in telecommunication service provisioning. By decoupling network functions (NFs) from the physical devices on which they run, NFV has the potential to lead to significant reductions in operating expenses (OPEX) and capital expenses (CAPEX) and facilitate the deployment of new services with increased agility and faster time-to-value. The NFV paradigm is still in its infancy and there is a large spectrum of opportunities for the research community to develop new architectures, systems and applications, and to evaluate alternatives and trade-offs in developing technologies for its successful deployment. In this paper, after discussing NFV and its relationship with complementary fields of software defined networking (SDN) and cloud computing, we survey the state-of-the-art in NFV, and identify promising research directions in this area. We also overview key NFV projects, standardization efforts, early implementations, use cases, and commercial products.
1,634 citations
TL;DR: This work can help to understand how to make full use of SDN's advantages to defeat DDoS attacks in cloud computing environments and how to prevent SDN itself from becoming a victim of DDoSDoS attacks, which are important for the smooth evolution ofSDN-based cloud without the distraction ofDDoS attacks.
Abstract: Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in cloud computing environments are growing due to the essential characteristics of cloud computing. With recent advances in software-defined networking (SDN), SDN-based cloud brings us new chances to defeat DDoS attacks in cloud computing environments. Nevertheless, there is a contradictory relationship between SDN and DDoS attacks. On one hand, the capabilities of SDN, including software-based traffic analysis, centralized control, global view of the network, dynamic updating of forwarding rules, make it easier to detect and react to DDoS attacks. On the other hand, the security of SDN itself remains to be addressed, and potential DDoS vulnerabilities exist across SDN platforms. In this paper, we discuss the new trends and characteristics of DDoS attacks in cloud computing, and provide a comprehensive survey of defense mechanisms against DDoS attacks using SDN. In addition, we review the studies about launching DDoS attacks on SDN, as well as the methods against DDoS attacks in SDN. To the best of our knowledge, the contradictory relationship between SDN and DDoS attacks has not been well addressed in previous works. This work can help to understand how to make full use of SDN's advantages to defeat DDoS attacks in cloud computing environments and how to prevent SDN itself from becoming a victim of DDoS attacks, which are important for the smooth evolution of SDN-based cloud without the distraction of DDoS attacks.
669 citations
08 Dec 2016
TL;DR: This work builds a Deep Neural Network model for an intrusion detection system and train the model with the NSL-KDD Dataset and confirms that the deep learning approach shows strong potential to be used for flow-based anomaly detection in SDN environments.
Abstract: Software Defined Networking (SDN) has recently emerged to become one of the promising solutions for the future Internet. With the logical centralization of controllers and a global network overview, SDN brings us a chance to strengthen our network security. However, SDN also brings us a dangerous increase in potential threats. In this paper, we apply a deep learning approach for flow-based anomaly detection in an SDN environment. We build a Deep Neural Network (DNN) model for an intrusion detection system and train the model with the NSL-KDD Dataset. In this work, we just use six basic features (that can be easily obtained in an SDN environment) taken from the forty-one features of NSL-KDD Dataset. Through experiments, we confirm that the deep learning approach shows strong potential to be used for flow-based anomaly detection in SDN environments.
575 citations
TL;DR: The challenges to securing the network from the persistent attacker are discussed, and the holistic approach to the security architecture that is required for SDN is described.
Abstract: The proposition of increased innovation in network applications and reduced cost for network operators has won over the networking world to the vision of software-defined networking (SDN). With the excitement of holistic visibility across the network and the ability to program network devices, developers have rushed to present a range of new SDN-compliant hardware, software, and services. However, amidst this frenzy of activity, one key element has only recently entered the debate: Network Security . In this paper, security in SDN is surveyed presenting both the research community and industry advances in this area. The challenges to securing the network from the persistent attacker are discussed, and the holistic approach to the security architecture that is required for SDN is described. Future research directions that will be key to providing network security in SDN are identified.
378 citations
TL;DR: This paper provides a detailed definition of the problem, analyzing how new trends such as software defined networking and network function virtualization can assist in the slicing, and describes some research challenges on this topic.
Abstract: New architectural and design approaches for radio access networks have appeared with the introduction of network virtualization in the wireless domain. One of these approaches splits the wireless network infrastructure into isolated virtual slices under their own management, requirements, and characteristics. Despite the advances in wireless virtualization, there are still many open issues regarding the resource allocation and isolation of wireless slices. Because of the dynamics and shared nature of the wireless medium, guaranteeing that the traffic on one slice will not affect the traffic on the others has proven to be difficult. In this paper, we focus on the detailed definition of the problem, discussing its challenges. We also provide a review of existing works that deal with the problem, analyzing how new trends such as software defined networking and network function virtualization can assist in the slicing. We will finally describe some research challenges on this topic.
344 citations
TL;DR: It is shown that SDN can manage the network efficiently for improving the performance of big data applications, and big data can benefit SDN as well, including traffic engineering, cross-layer design, defeating security attacks, and SDN-based intra and inter data center networks.
Abstract: Both big data and software-defined networking (SDN) have attracted great interests from both academia and industry. These two important areas have traditionally been addressed separately in the most of previous works. However, on the one hand, the good features of SDN can greatly facilitate big data acquisition, transmission, storage, and processing. On the other hand, big data will have profound impacts on the design and operation of SDN. In this paper, we present the good features of SDN in solving several issues prevailing with big data applications, including big data processing in cloud data centers, data delivery, joint optimization, scientific big data architectures and scheduling issues. We show that SDN can manage the network efficiently for improving the performance of big data applications. In addition, we show that big data can benefit SDN as well, including traffic engineering, cross-layer design, defeating security attacks, and SDN-based intra and inter data center networks. Moreover, we discuss a number of open issues that need to be addressed to jointly consider big data and SDN in future research.
280 citations
TL;DR: This article comprehensively survey studies that examine the SDN paradigm in optical networks; in brief, it mainly organize the SDON studies into studies focused on the infrastructure layer, the control layer, and the application layer.
Abstract: The emerging software defined networking (SDN) paradigm separates the data plane from the control plane and centralizes network control in an SDN controller. Applications interact with controllers to implement network services, such as network transport with quality of service. SDN facilitates the virtualization of network functions so that multiple virtual networks can operate over a given installed physical network infrastructure. Due to the specific characteristics of optical (photonic) communication components and the high optical transmission capacities, SDN-based optical networking poses particular challenges, but holds also great potential. In this article, we comprehensively survey studies that examine the SDN paradigm in optical networks; in brief, we survey the area of software defined optical networks (SDONs). We mainly organize the SDON studies into studies focused on the infrastructure layer, the control layer, and the application layer. Moreover, we cover SDON studies focused on network virtualization, as well as SDON studies focused on the orchestration of multilayer and multidomain networking. Based on the survey, we identify open challenges for SDONs and outline future directions.
269 citations
TL;DR: The proposed model and solution represent the first known vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) implementation of software defined network (SDN) concept and prove that CDS is NP-hard by constructing a polynomial-time reduction from the Maximum Weighted Independent Set (MWIS) problem.
Abstract: This paper presents the first study on scheduling for cooperative data dissemination in a hybrid infrastructure-to-vehicle (I2V) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication environment. We formulate the novel problem of cooperative data scheduling (CDS). Each vehicle informs the road-side unit (RSU) the list of its current neighboring vehicles and the identifiers of the retrieved and newly requested data. The RSU then selects sender and receiver vehicles and corresponding data for V2V communication, while it simultaneously broadcasts a data item to vehicles that are instructed to tune into the I2V channel. The goal is to maximize the number of vehicles that retrieve their requested data. We prove that CDS is NP-hard by constructing a polynomial-time reduction from the Maximum Weighted Independent Set (MWIS) problem. Scheduling decisions are made by transforming CDS to MWIS and using a greedy method to approximately solve MWIS. We build a simulation model based on realistic traffic and communication characteristics and demonstrate the superiority and scalability of the proposed solution. The proposed model and solution, which are based on the centralized scheduler at the RSU, represent the first known vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) implementation of software defined network (SDN) concept.
262 citations
TL;DR: A comprehensively survey hypervisors for SDN networks and exhaustively compare the network attribute abstraction and isolation features of the existing SDN hypervisors is exhaustively compared.
Abstract: Software defined networking (SDN) has emerged as a promising paradigm for making the control of communication networks flexible. SDN separates the data packet forwarding plane, i.e., the data plane, from the control plane and employs a central controller. Network virtualization allows the flexible sharing of physical networking resources by multiple users (tenants). Each tenant runs its own applications over its virtual network, i.e., its slice of the actual physical network. The virtualization of SDN networks promises to allow networks to leverage the combined benefits of SDN networking and network virtualization and has therefore attracted significant research attention in recent years. A critical component for virtualizing SDN networks is an SDN hypervisor that abstracts the underlying physical SDN network into multiple logically isolated virtual SDN networks (vSDNs), each with its own controller. We comprehensively survey hypervisors for SDN networks in this paper. We categorize the SDN hypervisors according to their architecture into centralized and distributed hypervisors. We furthermore sub-classify the hypervisors according to their execution platform into hypervisors running exclusively on general-purpose compute platforms, or on a combination of general-purpose compute platforms with general- or special-purpose network elements. We exhaustively compare the network attribute abstraction and isolation features of the existing SDN hypervisors. As part of the future research agenda, we outline the development of a performance evaluation framework for SDN hypervisors.
261 citations
TL;DR: This paper aims to shed light on SDN related issues and give insight into the challenges facing the future of this revolutionary network model, from both protocol and architecture perspectives, and present different existing solutions and mitigation techniques that address SDN scalability, elasticity, dependability, reliability, high availability, resiliency, security, and performance concerns.
Abstract: With the advent of cloud computing, many new networking concepts have been introduced to simplify network management and bring innovation through network programmability. The emergence of the software-defined networking (SDN) paradigm is one of these adopted concepts in the cloud model so as to eliminate the network infrastructure maintenance processes and guarantee easy management. In this fashion, SDN offers real-time performance and responds to high availability requirements. However, this new emerging paradigm has been facing many technological hurdles; some of them are inherent, while others are inherited from existing adopted technologies. In this paper, our purpose is to shed light on SDN related issues and give insight into the challenges facing the future of this revolutionary network model, from both protocol and architecture perspectives. Additionally, we aim to present different existing solutions and mitigation techniques that address SDN scalability, elasticity, dependability, reliability, high availability, resiliency, security, and performance concerns. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
234 citations
TL;DR: This paper is the first to provide a comprehensive description of every possible IoT implementation aspect for the two technologies, software defined networking and network virtualization, by outlining the ways of combining SDN and NV.
Abstract: The imminent arrival of the Internet of Things (IoT), which consists of a vast number of devices with heterogeneous characteristics, means that future networks need a new architecture to accommodate the expected increase in data generation. Software defined networking (SDN) and network virtualization (NV) are two technologies that promise to cost-effectively provide the scale and versatility necessary for IoT services. In this paper, we survey the state of the art on the application of SDN and NV to IoT. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to provide a comprehensive description of every possible IoT implementation aspect for the two technologies. We start by outlining the ways of combining SDN and NV. Subsequently, we present how the two technologies can be used in the mobile and cellular context, with emphasis on forthcoming 5G networks. Afterward, we move to the study of wireless sensor networks, arguably the current foremost example of an IoT network. Finally, we review some general SDN-NV-enabled IoT architectures, along with real-life deployments and use-cases. We conclude by giving directions for future research on this topic.
TL;DR: The concept of hierarchical NSaaS is introduced, helping operators to offer customized end-to-end cellular networks as a service and enabling operators to build network slices for vertical industries more agilely.
Abstract: With the blossoming of network functions virtualization and software-defined networks, networks are becoming more and more agile with features like resilience, programmability, and open interfaces, which help operators to launch a network or service with more flexibility and shorter time to market. Recently, the concept of network slicing has been proposed to facilitate the building of a dedicated and customized logical network with virtualized resources. In this article, we introduce the concept of hierarchical NSaaS, helping operators to offer customized end-to-end cellular networks as a service. Moreover, the service orchestration and service level agreement mapping for quality assurance are introduced to illustrate the architecture of service management across different levels of service models. Finally, we illustrate the process of network slicing as a service within operators by typical examples. With network slicing as a service, we believe that the supporting system will transform itself to a production system by merging the operation and business domains, and enabling operators to build network slices for vertical industries more agilely.
TL;DR: This survey evaluates the use of SDN in four classes of popular wireless networks: cellular, sensor, mesh, and home networks, and classify the different advantages that can be obtained by using SDN across this range of networks, hoping that this classification identifies unexplored opportunities for usingSDN to improve the operation and performance of wireless networks.
Abstract: One of the primary architectural principles behind the Internet is the use of distributed protocols, which facilitates fault tolerance and distributed management. Unfortunately, having nodes (i.e., switches and routers) perform control decisions independently makes it difficult to control the network or even understand or debug its overall emergent behavior. As a result, networks are often inefficient, unstable, and fragile. This Internet architecture also poses a significant, often insurmountable, challenge to the deployment of new protocols and evolution of existing ones. Software defined networking (SDN) is a recent networking architecture with promising properties relative to these weaknesses in traditional networks. SDN decouples the control plane, which makes the network forwarding decisions, from the data plane, which mainly forwards the data. This decoupling enables more centralized control where coordinated decisions directly guide the network to desired operating conditions. Moreover, decoupling the control enables graceful evolution of protocols, and the deployment of new protocols without having to replace the data plane switches. In this survey, we review recent work that leverages SDN in wireless network settings, where they are not currently widely adopted or well understood. More specifically, we evaluate the use of SDN in four classes of popular wireless networks: cellular, sensor, mesh, and home networks. We classify the different advantages that can be obtained by using SDN across this range of networks, and hope that this classification identifies unexplored opportunities for using SDN to improve the operation and performance of wireless networks.
TL;DR: Data plane, control plane and application plane as the three planes of SDN and the interfaces between them such as OpenFlow are investigated and the challenges and the latest technologies in relation to SDN are examined.
22 Aug 2016
TL;DR: The OpenNetVM architecture is described, an efficient packet processing framework that greatly simplifies the development of network functions, as well as research into their management and optimization, and its performance is evaluated compared to existing NFV platforms.
Abstract: Network middleboxes are growing in number and diversity. Middleboxes have been deployed widely to complement the basic end-to-end functionality provided by the Internet Protocol suite that depends only on the minimal functionality of a best-effort network layer. The move from purpose-built hardware middleboxes to software appliances running in virtual machines provides much needed deployment flexibility, but significant challenges remain. Just as Software Defined Networking (SDN) research and product development was greatly accelerated with the release of several open source SDN platforms, we believe that Network Function Virtualization (NFV) research can see similar growth with the development of a flexible platform that enables high performance NFV prototypes. Towards this end we have been building OpenNetVM, an efficient packet processing framework that greatly simplifies the development of network functions, as well as research into their management and optimization. OpenNetVM runs network functions in lightweight Docker containers, enabling fast startup and reducing memory overheads. The OpenNetVM platform manager provides load balancing, flexible flow management, and service name abstractions. OpenNetVM efficiently routes packets through dynamically created service chains, achieving throughputs of 10 Gbps even when traversing a chain of 6 NFs. In this paper we describe our architecture and evaluate its performance compared to existing NFV platforms.
01 Jun 2016
TL;DR: Simulation results confirm that QAR outperforms the existing learning solution and provides fast convergence with QoS provisioning, facilitating the practical implementations in large-scale software service-defined networks.
Abstract: Software-defined networks (SDNs) have been recognized as the next-generation networking paradigm that decouples the data forwarding from the centralized control. To realize the merits of dedicated QoS provisioning and fast route (re-)configuration services over the decoupled SDNs, various QoS requirements in packet delay, loss, and throughput should be supported by an efficient transportation with respect to each specific application. In this paper, a QoS-aware adaptive routing (QAR) is proposed in the designed multi-layer hierarchical SDNs. Specifically, the distributed hierarchical control plane architecture is employed to minimize signaling delay in large SDNs via three-levels design of controllers, i.e., the super, domain (or master), and slave controllers. Furthermore, QAR algorithm is proposed with the aid of reinforcement learning and QoS-aware reward function, achieving a time-efficient, adaptive, QoS-provisioning packet forwarding. Simulation results confirm that QAR outperforms the existing learning solution and provides fast convergence with QoS provisioning, facilitating the practical implementations in large-scale software service-defined networks.
14 Mar 2016
TL;DR: This paper shows how to give applications the illusion of high-speed forwarding, large rule tables, and fast updates by combining the best of hardware and software processing.
Abstract: Software-Defined Networking (SDN) allows control applications to install fine-grained forwarding policies in the underlying switches. While Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) enables fast lookups in hardware switches with flexible wildcard rule patterns, the cost and power requirements limit the number of rules the switches can support. To make matters worse, these hardware switches cannot sustain a high rate of updates to the rule table. In this paper, we show how to give applications the illusion of high-speed forwarding, large rule tables, and fast updates by combining the best of hardware and software processing. Our CacheFlow system "caches" the most popular rules in the small TCAM, while relying on software to handle the small amount of "cache miss" traffic. However, we cannot blindly apply existing cache-replacement algorithms, because of dependencies between rules with overlapping patterns. Rather than cache large chains of dependent rules, we "splice" long dependency chains to cache smaller groups of rules while preserving the semantics of the policy. Experiments with our CacheFlow prototype---on both real and synthetic workloads and policies---demonstrate that rule splicing makes effective use of limited TCAM space, while adapting quickly to changes in the policy and the traffic demands.
10 Apr 2016
TL;DR: This paper considers dynamic controller assignment so as to minimize the average response time of the control plane, and proposes a hierarchically two-phase algorithm that integrates key concepts from both matching theory and coalitional games to solve it efficiently.
Abstract: Software defined networking is becoming increasingly prevalent in data center networks for its programmability that enables centralized network configuration and management. However, since switches are statically assigned to controllers, traffic dynamics cause load imbalance among the controllers. As a result, some controllers are not fully utilized, while switches connected to overloaded controllers may experience long response times. In this paper, we consider dynamic controller assignment so as to minimize the average response time of the control plane. We formulate this problem as a stable matching problem with transfers, and propose a hierarchically two-phase algorithm that integrates key concepts from both matching theory and coalitional games to solve it efficiently. Theoretical analysis proves that our algorithm converges to a near-optimal Nash stable solution within tens of iterations. Extensive simulations show that our approach reduces response time by about 86%, and achieves better load balancing among controllers compared to static assignment.
01 Jan 2016
TL;DR: This paper analyzes the security threats and countermeasures of Software-Defined Networking in detail from three aspects, based on which part of the SDN paradigm they target, i.e., the data forwarding layer, the control layer and the application layer.
Abstract: In recent years, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has been a focus of research. As a promising network architecture, SDN will possibly replace traditional networking, as it brings promising opportunities for network management in terms of simplicity, programmability, and elasticity. While many efforts are currently being made to standardize this emerging paradigm, careful attention needs to be also paid to security at this early design stage. This paper focuses on the security aspects of SDN. We begin by discussing characteristics and standards of SDN. On the basis of these, we discuss the security features as a whole and then analyze the security threats and countermeasures in detail from three aspects, based on which part of the SDN paradigm they target, i.e., the data forwarding layer, the control layer and the application layer. Countermeasure techniques that could be used to prevent, mitigate, or recover from some of such attacks are also described, while the threats encountered when developing these defensive mechanisms are highlighted.
22 Aug 2016
TL;DR: SNAP offers a simpler "centralized" stateful programming model, by allowing programmers to develop programs on top of one big switch rather than many, and relieves programmers of having to worry about how to distribute, place, and optimize access to these stateful arrays.
Abstract: Early programming languages for software-defined networking (SDN) were built on top of the simple match-action paradigm offered by OpenFlow 1.0. However, emerging hardware and software switches offer much more sophisticated support for persistent state in the data plane, without involving a central controller. Nevertheless, managing stateful, distributed systems efficiently and correctly is known to be one of the most challenging programming problems. To simplify this new SDN problem, we introduce SNAP. SNAP offers a simpler "centralized" stateful programming model, by allowing programmers to develop programs on top of one big switch rather than many. These programs may contain reads and writes to global, persistent arrays, and as a result, programmers can implement a broad range of applications, from stateful firewalls to fine-grained traffic monitoring. The SNAP compiler relieves programmers of having to worry about how to distribute, place, and optimize access to these stateful arrays by doing it all for them. More specifically, the compiler discovers read/write dependencies between arrays and translates one-big-switch programs into an efficient internal representation based on a novel variant of binary decision diagrams. This internal representation is used to construct a mixed-integer linear program, which jointly optimizes the placement of state and the routing of traffic across the underlying physical topology. We have implemented a prototype compiler and applied it to about 20 SNAP programs over various topologies to demonstrate our techniques' scalability.
TL;DR: A reference framework for TE in the SDN is proposed, which consists of two parts, traffic measurement and traffic management; technologies related to traffic management include traffic load balancing, QoS-guarantee scheduling, energy-saving scheduling, and trafficmanagement for the hybrid IP/SDN.
Abstract: As the next generation network architecture, software-defined networking (SDN) has exciting application prospects. Its core idea is to separate the forwarding layer and control layer of network system, where network operators can program packet forwarding behavior to significantly improve the innovation capability of network applications. Traffic engineering (TE) is an important network application, which studies measurement and management of network traffic, and designs reasonable routing mechanisms to guide network traffic to improve utilization of network resources, and better meet requirements of the network quality of service (QoS). Compared with the traditional networks, the SDN has many advantages to support TE due to its distinguish characteristics, such as isolation of control and forwarding, global centralized control, and programmability of network behavior. This paper focuses on the traffic engineering technology based on the SDN. First, we propose a reference framework for TE in the SDN, which consists of two parts, traffic measurement and traffic management. Traffic measurement is responsible for monitoring and analyzing real-time network traffic, as a prerequisite for traffic management. In the proposed framework, technologies related to traffic measurement include network parameters measurement, a general measurement framework, and traffic analysis and prediction; technologies related to traffic management include traffic load balancing, QoS-guarantee scheduling, energy-saving scheduling, and traffic management for the hybrid IP/SDN. Current existing technologies are discussed in detail, and our insights into future development of TE in the SDN are offered.
TL;DR: Three scenarios are presented and analysed to delineate different potential improvement areas pursued through the introduction of SDN/NFV technologies in the satellite ground segment domain and a number of use cases are developed to gain further insight into specific capabilities and to identify the technical challenges stemming from them.
01 Oct 2016
TL;DR: A new software defined networking (SDN) based dynamic resource allocation and management architecture for HAS systems is proposed, which aims to alleviate scalability issues and improve the per-client QoE.
Abstract: HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS) is being adopted with increasing frequency and becoming the de-facto standard for video streaming. However, the client-driven, on-off adaptation behavior of HAS results in uneven bandwidth competition and this is exacerbated when a large number of clients share the same bottleneck network link and compete for the available bandwidth. With HAS each client independently strives to maximize its individual share of the available bandwidth, which leads to bandwidth competition and a decrease in end-user quality of experience (QoE). The competition causes scalability issues, which are quality instability, unfair bandwidth sharing and network resource underutilization. We propose a new software defined networking (SDN) based dynamic resource allocation and management architecture for HAS systems, which aims to alleviate these scalability issues and improve the per-client QoE. Our architecture manages and allocates the network resources dynamically for each client based on its expected QoE. Experimental results show that the proposed architecture significantly enhances scalability by improving per-client QoE by at least 30% and supporting up to 80% more clients with the same QoE compared to the conventional schemes.
TL;DR: This survey aims to give particular attention to OpenFlow-based SDN and present an up-to-date view to existing security challenges and countermeasures in the literature and attempts to simulate more research attention to these issues in future OpenFlow and SDN development.
01 Nov 2016
TL;DR: This work describes a simple architecture deployed in an enterprise network that gathers traffic data using the OpenFlow protocol and presents the data-sets that can be obtained and shows how several ML techniques can be applied to it for traffic classification.
Abstract: Software Defined Networks (SDNs) provides a separation between the control plane and the forwarding plane of networks. The software implementation of the control plane and the built in data collection mechanisms of the OpenFlow protocol promise to be excellent tools to implement Machine Learning (ML) network control applications. A first step in that direction is to understand the type of data that can be collected in SDNs and how information can be learned from that data. In this work we describe a simple architecture deployed in an enterprise network that gathers traffic data using the OpenFlow protocol. We present the data-sets that can be obtained and show how several ML techniques can be applied to it for traffic classification. The results indicate that high accuracy classification can be obtained with the data-sets using supervised learning.
TL;DR: An overview of SDN, network virtualization, and network function virtualization is provided, and an in-depth analysis about changes related to protocol operation and architecture when adopting SDN and virtualization in mobile networks is presented.
Abstract: Software-defined networking (SDN) features the decoupling of the control plane and data plane, a programmable network and virtualization, which enables network infrastructure sharing and the "softwarization" of the network functions. Recently, many research works have tried to redesign the traditional mobile network using two of these concepts in order to deal with the challenges faced by mobile operators, such as the rapid growth of mobile traffic and new services. In this paper, we first provide an overview of SDN, network virtualization, and network function virtualization, and then describe the current LTE mobile network architecture as well as its challenges and issues. By analyzing and categorizing a wide range of the latest research works on SDN and virtualization in LTE mobile networks, we present a general architecture for SDN and virtualization in mobile networks (called SDVMN) and then propose a hierarchical taxonomy based on the different levels of the carrier network. We also present an in-depth analysis about changes related to protocol operation and architecture when adopting SDN and virtualization in mobile networks. In addition, we list specific use cases and applications that benefit from SDVMN. Last but not least, we discuss the open issues and future research directions of SDVMN.
TL;DR: The state-of-the-art in traffic engineering for SDN with attention to four cores including flow management, fault tolerance, topology update, and traffic analysis is discussed in detail.
Abstract: SDN is an emerging networking paradigm that separates the network control plane from the data forwarding plane with the promise to dramatically improve network resource utilization, simplify network management, reduce operating costs, and promote innovation and evolution. While traffic engineering techniques have been widely exploited for ATM and IP/MPLS networks for performance optimization in the past, the promising SDN networks require novel traffic engineering solutions that can exploit the global network view, network status, and flow patterns/characteristics in order to achieve better traffic control and management. This article discusses the state-of-the-art in traffic engineering for SDN with attention to four cores including flow management, fault tolerance, topology update, and traffic analysis. Challenging issues for SDN traffic engineering solutions are discussed in detail.
TL;DR: This article presents an architectural framework called SDNV that offers a clear holistic vision of integrating key principles of both SDN and NFV into unified network architecture, and provides guidelines for synthesizing research efforts toward combining SDN-NFV in future networks.
Abstract: SDN and NFV are two significant innovations in networking. The evolution of both SDN and NFV has shown strong synergy between these two paradigms. Recent research efforts have been made toward combining SDN and NFV to fully exploit the advantages of both technologies. However, integrating SDN and NFV is challenging due to the variety of intertwined network elements involved and the complex interaction among them. In this article, we attempt to tackle this challenging problem by presenting an architectural framework called SDNV. This framework offers a clear holistic vision of integrating key principles of both SDN and NFV into unified network architecture, and provides guidelines for synthesizing research efforts toward combining SDN and NFV in future networks. Based on this framework, we also discuss key technical challenges to realizing SDN-NFV integration and identify some important topics for future research, with a hope to arouse the research community's interest in this emerging area.
22 Aug 2016
TL;DR: Owan is presented, a novel traffic management system that optimizes wide-area bulk transfers with centralized joint control of the optical and network layers with efficient algorithms to jointly optimize optical circuit setup, routing and rate allocation, and dynamically adapt them to traffic demand changes.
Abstract: Bulk transfer on the wide-area network (WAN) is a fundamental service to many globally-distributed applications. It is challenging to efficiently utilize expensive WAN bandwidth to achieve short transfer completion time and meet mission-critical deadlines. Advancements in software-defined networking (SDN) and optical hardware make it feasible and beneficial to quickly reconfigure optical devices in the optical layer, which brings a new opportunity for traffic management on the WAN. We present Owan, a novel traffic management system that optimizes wide-area bulk transfers with centralized joint control of the optical and network layers. \sysname can dynamically change the network-layer topology by reconfiguring the optical devices. We develop efficient algorithms to jointly optimize optical circuit setup, routing and rate allocation, and dynamically adapt them to traffic demand changes. We have built a prototype of Owan with commodity optical and electrical hardware. Testbed experiments and large-scale simulations on two ISP topologies and one inter-DC topology show that \sysname completes transfers up to 4.45x faster on average, and up to 1.36x more transfers meet their deadlines, as compared to prior methods that only control the network layer.