Cloud and Edge Networking

6Edge and Cloud Networking Commercial Products

6.1. Introduction to SDN products

In the previous chapters, we introduced SDN, its centralized architecture and its use as virtual machines. In this chapter, we will examine the main categories of SDN-related products. They can be classified into six main classes. The first class is the fabrics that form the access networks to the servers in data centers. SD-WANs (Software-Defined Wide Area Networks) represent the second major class and certainly the most important economically. They concern a solution enabling the optimization of the use of a company’s WAN networks. The third class is the virtualization of the local area network under the name of vCPE (Virtual Customer Premises Equipment). The fourth category is antenna box virtualization, especially Wi-Fi (vWi-Fi). The fifth category contains the vRAN (virtual Radio Access Network) which proposes the virtualization of the access network between the antennas on which the users are connected and the core network. Finally, the last class concerns the virtualization of the core networks of 4G and 5G: vEPC (virtual Evolved Packet Core) and 5GC (5G Core). We will describe these different classes in the following sections.

6.2. Fabric control

A fabric is the network associated with a data center that allows us to go from one server to another, internally. The fabric is also used to access any server from the outside. The fabric has horizontal and vertical rows offering multiple paths ...