Implementing SDN into Computer Network Lessons

This paper describes the issue of introducing SDN to students of computer networks. The most important theoretical knowledge is summarized in the form of key points, students should know about. Practical experience is presented in the area of deployment of SDN in data centers with aim on connecting the existing knowledge from traditional computer networks. This connection is explained on problems of traditional networks in data centers and mitigation of these problems by using SDN. Learned information is then extended by presenting a practical demo application in Mininet environment. The application shows possible usage of SDN for making a data center more power-efficient. This application is put in context by the theory of power consumption of data center devices which can be significantly reduced if SDN are used. Purpose of the application is to motivate students to continue in research of SDN area

PLAN: Joint policy- and network-aware VM management for cloud data centers

Policies play an important role in network configuration and therefore in offering secure and high performance services especially over multi-tenant Cloud Data Center (DC) environments. At the same time, elastic resource provisioning through virtualization often disregards policy requirements, assuming that the policy implementation is handled by the underlying network infrastructure. This can result in policy violations, performance degradation and security vulnerabilities. In this paper, we define PLAN, a PoLicy-Aware and Network-aware VM management scheme to jointly consider DC communication cost reduction through Virtual Machine (VM) migration while meeting network policy requirements. We show that the problem is NP-hard and derive an efficient approximate algorithm to reduce communication cost while adhering to policy constraints. Through extensive evaluation, we show that PLAN can reduce topology-wide communication cost by 38 percent over diverse aggregate traffic and configuration policies

Load Balancing Mechanisms in the Software Defined Networks: A Systematic and Comprehensive Review of the Literature

With the expansion of the network and increasing their users, as well as emerging new technologies, such as cloud computing and big data, managing traditional networks is difficult. Therefore, it is necessary to change the traditional network architecture. Lately, to address this issue, a notion named software-defined network (SDN) has been proposed, which makes network management more conformable. Due to limited network resources and to meet the requirements of quality of service, one of the points that must be considered is load balancing issue that serves to distribute data traffic among multiple resources in order to maximize the efficiency and reliability of network resources. Load balancing is established based on the local information of the network in the conventional network. Hence, it is not very precise. However, SDN controllers have a global view of the network and can produce more optimized load balances. Although load balancing mechanisms are important in the SDN, to the best of our knowledge, there exists no precise and systematic review or survey on investigating these issues. Hence, this paper reviews the load balancing mechanisms which have been used in the SDN systematically based on two categories, deterministic and non-deterministic. Also, this paper represents benefits and some weakness regarded of the selected load balancing algorithms and investigates the metrics of their algorithms. In addition, the important challenges of these algorithms have been reviewed, so better load balancing techniques can be applied by the researchers in the future. © 2018 IEEE