Software-Defined Networking 2

Conclusions and Perspectives

C.1. Summary of contributions

Software-defined networking (SDN) has increasingly gained traction over the past few years in both academia and research. The SDN paradigm builds its promises on the separation of concerns between the network control logic and the forwarding devices, as well as the logical centralization of the network intelligence in software components. Becuase of these key attributes, SDN is believed to work with network virtualization to fundamentally change the networking landscape toward more flexible, agile, adaptable and highly automated next-generation networks.

Despite all the hype, SDN raises many concerns and questions regarding its implementation and deployment. For instance, current SDN deployments based on physically centralized control architectures present several issues of scalability and reliability. As a result, distributed SDN control architectures were proposed as a suitable solution for overcoming these problems. However, there are still ongoing community debates about the best and most optimal approach to decentralizing the network control plane in order to harness the full potential of SDN.

In the early stages of our work, we conducted a comprehensive literature survey of the wide variety of existing SDN controller platforms. In addition to reviewing the SDN concept and comparing the SDN architecture to the traditional network architecture, we proposed a taxonomy of state-of-the-art SDN controller platforms ...