A Survey on the Contributions of Software-Defined Networking to Traffic Engineering

Since the appearance of OpenFlow back in 2008, software-defined networking (SDN) has gained momentum. Although there are some discrepancies between the standards developing organizations working with SDN about what SDN is and how it is defined, they all outline traffic engineering (TE) as a key application. One of the most common objectives of TE is the congestion minimization, where techniques such as traffic splitting among multiple paths or advanced reservation systems are used. In such a scenario, this manuscript surveys the role of a comprehensive list of SDN protocols in TE solutions, in order to assess how these protocols can benefit TE. The SDN protocols have been categorized using the SDN architecture proposed by the open networking foundation, which differentiates among data-controller plane interfaces, application-controller plane interfaces, and management interfaces, in order to state how the interface type in which they operate influences TE. In addition, the impact of the SDN protocols on TE has been evaluated by comparing them with the path computation element (PCE)-based architecture. The PCE-based architecture has been selected to measure the impact of SDN on TE because it is the most novel TE architecture until the date, and because it already defines a set of metrics to measure the performance of TE solutions. We conclude that using the three types of interfaces simultaneously will result in more powerful and enhanced TE solutions, since they benefit TE in complementary ways.European Commission through the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (GN4) under Grant 691567 Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the Secure Deployment of Services Over SDN and NFV-based Networks Project S&NSEC under Grant TEC2013-47960-C4-3-

Proactive controller assignment schemes in SDN for fast recovery

​© 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.A sizeable software defined network with a single controller responsible for all forwarding elements is potentially failure-prone and inadequate for dynamic network loads. To this end, having multiple controllers improves resilience and distributes network control overhead. However, when there is a disruption in the control plane, a rapid and performant controller-switch assignment is critical, which is a challenging technical question. In this work, we propose a proactive switch assignment approach in case of controller failures using a genetic algorithm based heuristic that considers controller load distribution, reassignment cost and probability of failure. Moreover, we compare the performance of our scheme with random and greedy algorithms. Experiment results show that our proposed PREFCP framework has better performance in terms of probability of failure and controller load distributio

On load balancing via switch migration in software-defined networking

Switch-controller assignment is an essential task in multi-controller software-defined networking. Static assignments are not practical because network dynamics are complex and difficult to predetermine. Since network load varies both in space and time, the mapping of switches to controllers should be adaptive to sudden changes in the network. To that end, switch migration plays an important role in maintaining dynamic switch-controller mapping. Migrating switches from overloaded to underloaded controllers brings flexibility and adaptability to the network but, at the same time, deciding which switches should be migrated to which controllers, while maintaining a balanced load in the network, is a challenging task. This work presents a heuristic approach with solution shaking to solve the switch migration problem. Shift and swap moves are incorporated within a search scheme. Every move is evaluated by how much benefititwillgivetoboththeimmigrationandoutmigrationcontrollers.Theexperimentalresultsshowthat theproposedapproachisabletooutweighthestate-of-artapproaches,andimprovetheloadbalancingresults up to≈ 14% in some scenarios when compared to the most recent approach. In addition, the results show that the proposed work is more robust to controller failure than the state-of-art methods.Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (FCT) - UID/MULTI/00631/2019;info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A novel multipath-transmission supported software defined wireless network architecture

The inflexible management and operation of today\u27s wireless access networks cannot meet the increasingly growing specific requirements, such as high mobility and throughput, service differentiation, and high-level programmability. In this paper, we put forward a novel multipath-transmission supported software-defined wireless network architecture (MP-SDWN), with the aim of achieving seamless handover, throughput enhancement, and flow-level wireless transmission control as well as programmable interfaces. In particular, this research addresses the following issues: 1) for high mobility and throughput, multi-connection virtual access point is proposed to enable multiple transmission paths simultaneously over a set of access points for users and 2) wireless flow transmission rules and programmable interfaces are implemented into mac80211 subsystem to enable service differentiation and flow-level wireless transmission control. Moreover, the efficiency and flexibility of MP-SDWN are demonstrated in the performance evaluations conducted on a 802.11 based-testbed, and the experimental results show that compared to regular WiFi, our proposed MP-SDWN architecture achieves seamless handover and multifold throughput improvement, and supports flow-level wireless transmission control for different applications

Multi-controller Based Software-Defined Networking: A Survey

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a novel network paradigm that enables flexible management for networks. As the network size increases, the single centralized controller cannot meet the increasing demand for flow processing. Thus, the promising solution for SDN with large-scale networks is the multi-controller. In this paper, we present a compressive survey for multi-controller research in SDN. First, we introduce the overview of multi-controller, including the origin of multi-controller and its challenges. Then, we classify multi-controller research into four aspects (scalability, consistency, reliability, load balancing) depending on the process of implementing the multi-controller. Finally, we propose some relevant research issues to deal with in the future and conclude the multi-controller research