IEEE Software Defined Network Initiative

This paper outlines a proposal for setting up an IEEE initiative on software defined networks (SDNs) to facilitate professional and academic exchange of SDN-related ideas, research, and development. The proposal is a result of an intensive effort of a team consisting of the authors. After a comprehensive gap analysis, gaps and key opportunities were identified. Finally, a specific set of components along with schedule and financial consideration were proposed in the areas of publications, conferences, standards, education, certification, and publicity

Evolving SDN for Low-Power IoT Networks

Software Defined Networking (SDN) offers a flexible and scalable architecture that abstracts decision making away from individual devices and provides a programmable network platform. However, implementing a centralized SDN architecture within the constraints of a low-power wireless network faces considerable challenges. Not only is controller traffic subject to jitter due to unreliable links and network contention, but the overhead generated by SDN can severely affect the performance of other traffic. This paper addresses the challenge of bringing high-overhead SDN architecture to IEEE 802.15.4 networks. We explore how traditional SDN needs to evolve in order to overcome the constraints of low-power wireless networks, and discuss protocol and architectural optimizations necessary to reduce SDN control overhead - the main barrier to successful implementation. We argue that interoperability with the existing protocol stack is necessary to provide a platform for controller discovery and coexistence with legacy networks. We consequently introduce {\mu}SDN, a lightweight SDN framework for Contiki, with both IPv6 and underlying routing protocol interoperability, as well as optimizing a number of elements within the SDN architecture to reduce control overhead to practical levels. We evaluate {\mu}SDN in terms of latency, energy, and packet delivery. Through this evaluation we show how the cost of SDN control overhead (both bootstrapping and management) can be reduced to a point where comparable performance and scalability is achieved against an IEEE 802.15.4-2012 RPL-based network. Additionally, we demonstrate {\mu}SDN through simulation: providing a use-case where the SDN configurability can be used to provide Quality of Service (QoS) for critical network flows experiencing interference, and we achieve considerable reductions in delay and jitter in comparison to a scenario without SDN

ACINO: Second year report on dissemination and communication activities

This ACINO deliverable presents the communication and dissemination activities performed by the consortium during the first two years of the project. We have communicated using our website, Twitter account and by various communication actions: The website saw over 3000 unique visitors during the first year and over 4000 during the second year; The consortium Twitter account had 49 followers at the end of the first year and 80 at the end of the second year. We posted 50 tweets during the first year and 40 more during the second year; We also held a press release and an interview in a magazine during the first year, and had three more similar communication actions during the second year. The dissemination activities have been composed of participation in public events where the goals and concepts of ACINO were presented via publications, presentation, workshops, courses and demonstrations. Overall, over forty different dissemination activities have been performed: An article has been published in peer-reviewed, open access Journal of Green Engineering; Eighteen articles have been published in conferences: four during the first year and fourteen during the second. One of them was a post-deadline and six were invited papers; We have co-organised three workshops: the Workshop on Network Function Virtualization and Programmable Networks at EUCNC 2015, the first Workshop on Multi-Layer Network Orchestration (NetOrch) at ICTON 2016 and the stand-alone ONOS/CORD workshop; We have held 16 talks, tutorial, courses and demonstrations; Consortium members have won two prizes for work related to ACINO: a team of developers won the 3rd prize of the ONOS Build Hackathon, and Telefónica won the Best SDN-NFV solution award at the LTE and 5G World conference by presenting a solution in which Sedona Systems was involved; We have contributed to six IETF standardisation documents and done some implementation and test of these standards. We have contributed to two open source projects: the NetPhony and ONOS controllers, with the implementation of main features being accepted and merged to the core code of these open source projects. Finally, the project has devised detailed plans for its dissemination activities for the last year of the project. We have: Confirmed plans for the organisation of a workshop, the second edition of the NetOrch workshop, co-located with the ICTON conference; A solid plan for continued dissemination in conferences (already five accepted conference papers, five talk invitations and a list of conferences of interest) and in peer-reviewed journals, with one article accepted for publication in the Journal of Lightwave Technology, two articles under review and plans for four more; Some more planned contribution to open source projects

Timed Consistent Network Updates

Network updates such as policy and routing changes occur frequently in Software Defined Networks (SDN). Updates should be performed consistently, preventing temporary disruptions, and should require as little overhead as possible. Scalability is increasingly becoming an essential requirement in SDN. In this paper we propose to use time-triggered network updates to achieve consistent updates. Our proposed solution requires lower overhead than existing update approaches, without compromising the consistency during the update. We demonstrate that accurate time enables far more scalable consistent updates in SDN than previously available. In addition, it provides the SDN programmer with fine-grained control over the tradeoff between consistency and scalability.Comment: This technical report is an extended version of the paper "Timed Consistent Network Updates", which was accepted to the ACM SIGCOMM Symposium on SDN Research (SOSR) '15, Santa Clara, CA, US, June 201

Recursive SDN for Carrier Networks

Control planes for global carrier networks should be programmable (so that new functionality can be easily introduced) and scalable (so they can handle the numerical scale and geographic scope of these networks). Neither traditional control planes nor new SDN-based control planes meet both of these goals. In this paper, we propose a framework for recursive routing computations that combines the best of SDN (programmability) and traditional networks (scalability through hierarchy) to achieve these two desired properties. Through simulation on graphs of up to 10,000 nodes, we evaluate our design's ability to support a variety of routing and traffic engineering solutions, while incorporating a fast failure recovery mechanism

Mitigating DDoS attacks using OpenFlow-based software defined networking

Over the last years, Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks have become an increasing threat on the Internet, with recent attacks reaching traffic volumes of up to 500 Gbps. To make matters worse, web-based facilities that offer “DDoS-as-a-service” (i.e., Booters) allow for the layman to launch attacks in the order of tens of Gbps in exchange for only a few euros. A recent development in networking is the principle of Software Defined Networking (SDN), and related technologies such as OpenFlow. In SDN, the control plane and data plane of the network are decoupled. This has several advantages, such as centralized control over forwarding decisions, dynamic updating of forwarding rules, and easier and more flexible network configuration. Given these advantages, we expect SDN to be well-suited for DDoS attack mitigation. Typical mitigation solutions, however, are not built using SDN. In this paper we propose to design and to develop an OpenFlow-based mitigation architecture for DDoS attacks. The research involves looking at the applicability of OpenFlow, as well as studying existing solutions built on other technologies. The research is as yet in its beginning phase and will contribute towards a Ph.D. thesis after four years