Software Defined Mobile Networks (SDMN)

3Software Defined Networking Concepts

Xenofon Foukas,^1,2 Mahesh K. Marina,¹ and Kimon Kontovasilis²

¹ The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

² NCSR “Demokritos”, Athens, Greece

3.1 Introduction

Software defined networking (SDN) is an idea that has recently reignited the interest of network researchers for programmable networks and shifted the attention of the networking community to this topic by promising to make the process of designing and managing networks more innovative and simplified compared to the well-established but inflexible current approach.

Designing and managing computer networks can become a very daunting task due to the high level of complexity involved. The tight coupling between a network’s control plane (where the decisions of handling traffic are made) and data plane (where the actual forwarding of traffic takes place) gives rise to various challenges related to its management and evolution. Network operators need to manually transform high-level policies into low-level configuration commands, a process that for complex networks can be really challenging and error prone. Introducing new functionality to the network, like intrusion detection systems (IDS) and load balancers, usually requires tampering with the network’s infrastructure and has a direct impact on its logic, while deploying new protocols can be a slow process demanding years of standardization and testing to ensure interoperability among the implementations provided by various vendors. ...