The Impact of Network Topology on Software Defined Network Performance

Software Defined Network (SDN) is a new networking concept in which the data plane is decoupled from the control plane. Due to the huge demand on network resources and the rapidly increasing numbers of devices needing to be connected to the network, SDN paradigm has emerged as a potential solution for managing and solving such issues. However, SDN still faces many challenges when it comes to its achievable network performance in terms of delay, packet dropped rate, throughput, and other metrics. This thesis studies the impact of SDN topologies on network performances such as end-to-end latency, control packet overhead, and flow setup failure rate. Understanding the nature of each topology and how it is affecting the SDN performance help us make appropriate network design decisions that can enhance SDN systems. In this thesis, we study the impact of the network topology on SDN performances, by simulating the network performance under three different topology scenarios and evaluating the average end-to-end latency, flow setup failure rates and Open Flow control message overhead that are achievable under each of these three scenarios

Review of Path Selection Algorithms with Link Quality and Critical Switch Aware for Heterogeneous Traffic in SDN

Software Defined Networking (SDN) introduced network management flexibility that eludes traditional network architecture. Nevertheless, the pervasive demand for various cloud computing services with different levels of Quality of Service requirements in our contemporary world made network service provisioning challenging. One of these challenges is path selection (PS) for routing heterogeneous traffic with end-to-end quality of service support specific to each traffic class. The challenge had gotten the research community\u27s attention to the extent that many PSAs were proposed. However, a gap still exists that calls for further study. This paper reviews the existing PSA and the Baseline Shortest Path Algorithms (BSPA) upon which many relevant PSA(s) are built to help identify these gaps. The paper categorizes the PSAs into four, based on their path selection criteria, (1) PSAs that use static or dynamic link quality to guide PSD, (2) PSAs that consider the criticality of switch in terms of an update operation, FlowTable limitation or port capacity to guide PSD, (3) PSAs that consider flow variabilities to guide PSD and (4) The PSAs that use ML optimization in their PSD. We then reviewed and compared the techniques\u27 design in each category against the identified SDN PSA design objectives, solution approach, BSPA, and validation approaches. Finally, the paper recommends directions for further research

Energy-Aware Routing in Carrier-Grade Ethernet using SDN Approach

International audienceSoft-Defined Networking (SDN) is a new approach that enables operators to easily manage all the network elements. In this paper, we address the problem of energy-aware routing in SDN-based carrier-grade Ethernet networks. Our approach is based on turning off network nodes and links to reduce energy consumption, while respecting the rule space capacity for each Openflow switch, and maintaining an allowable maximum link utilization. The problem of identifying the optimal set of network elements to be turned off is NP-hard. We first present an exact model based on an Integer Linear Programming formulation for the problem. Then, we describe a set of first-fit heuristic algorithms suitable for large-sized networks. The exact and heuristic approaches are tested on SNDlib-based instances. Experimentations show the efficiency of both exact and heuristic methods for different network topologies. In particular, our heuristic algorithms are able to achieve a good balance between energy consumption, resource utilization, and network performance