As cloud computing and data center network flourishes, the network that was once designed to support traditional networking scenario must now satisfy new requirements to suit for the cloud environment and increasing demands. The Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm, with the control plane separated from the data plane, is widely regarded as the next generation networking technique. The objective of this thesis is to optimize network resources allocation in the software-defined data center networks (DCN). The SDN resources considered here are the SDN switch to controller link bandwidth and the switch flow table size. First, a queueing model is developed to provision the SDN switches with an appropriate number of switch-to-controller connections. Second, a controller-level admission control mechanism is proposed to determine if a new flow should be admitted to the network when the flow table is congested. Third, we study the fair and high-satisfaction resources allocation problem with the routing path optimized in software-defined DCN. The delay guarantees for delay-sensitive flows are also provided. Finally, some practical issues are considered for the resources allocation algorithms. The provided theoretical analysis and simulation results in this dissertation improve the efficiency of resource allocation in software-defined DCN.Ph.D
