Adopting Software-Defined Networking: Challenges and Recent Developments

Abstract

Traditional network management only allows to deploy a predefined set of management policies whose parameters can be adapted to specific network conditions. The incorporation of new management policies requires complex control/data plane code changes. Objectives beyond fairness and the consideration of additional traffic properties lead to new challenges in the implementation and performance for traditional network element. This calls for novel abstractions that enable the definition of management policies. Designing such abstractions however is non-trivial, as they must satisfy a number of possibly conflicting requirements as expressiveness, simplicity, and performance. Initially, SDN has been promoted as a simpler and more flexible way of managing networks than traditional approaches. In this talk we critically look over current developments in SDN and identify interesting research directions.