Software-Defined Networking 2

Introduction

I.1. General context

The unprecedented growth in demands and data traffic and the emergence of network virtualization, along with the ever-expanding use of mobile equipment in the modern network environment, have highlighted major problems that are essentially inherent to the Internet’s conventional architecture. This made the task of managing and controlling the information coming from a growing number of connected devices increasingly complex and specialized.

Indeed, the traditional networking infrastructure is considered highly rigid and static as it was initially conceived for a particular type of traffic, namely monotonous text-based contents, which makes it poorly suited to today’s interactive and dynamic multimedia streams, generated by increasingly demanding users. Along with multimedia trends, the recent emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) has allowed for the creation of new advanced services with more stringent communication requirements in order to support its innovative use cases. In particular, e-health is a typical IoT use case where the healthcare services delivered to remote patients (e.g. diagnosis, surgery, medical records) are highly intolerant of delay, quality and privacy. Such sensitive data and life-critical traffic are barely supported by traditional networks.

Furthermore, in the traditional architecture where the control logic is purely distributed and localized, solving a specific networking problem or adjusting a particular network ...