Adaptive Resource Management and Control in Software Defined Networks

Abstract

The heterogeneous nature of the applications, technologies and equipment that today's networks have to support has made the management of such infrastructures a complex task. The Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm has emerged as a promising solution to reduce this complexity through the creation of a unified control plane independent of specific vendor equipment. However, designing a SDN-based solution for network resource management raises several challenges as it should exhibit flexibility, scalability and adaptability. In this paper, we present a new SDN-based management and control framework for fixed backbone networks, which provides support for both static and dynamic resource management applications. The framework consists of three layers which interact with each other through a set of interfaces. We develop a placement algorithm to determine the allocation of managers and controllers in the proposed distributed management and control layer. We then show how this layer can satisfy the requirements of two specific applications for adaptive load-balancing and energy management purposes.

An Effective Approach to Controller Placement in Software Defined Wide Area Networks

“…Tradeoff between time and accuracy is analyzed in detail via numerous real topologies. Authors of [29] propose an SDN-based management and control framework for fixed backbone networks. Algorithms were developed to allocate managers and controllers in the control layer to achieve adaptive load-balancing and energy management.…”

Scalable Cache Management for ISP-Operated Content Delivery Services

“…In general, centralized solutions are well-suited in the case of applications for which the time between each execution is significantly greater than the time to collect, compute and disseminate results. In contrast, distributed management approaches are usually considered to implement the logic of applications executed at short timescales [13]. In this paper, we focus on a content management application that can be executed at short timescales (for example every 30 minutes) to better track changes in the user demand and focus on decentralized management plane solutions, where one cache manager is associated with a single caching location.…”

Decentralized Solutions for Monitoring Large-Scale Software-Defined Networks

“…The research will be based on the SDN framework proposed in [9] which introduces a clear separation between management and control functionality. A set of managers, distributed over the network, hosts various management applications that implement the necessary logic to decide on network (re)configurations, while corresponding controllers are in charge of enforcing those decisions.…”

“…To communicate with the forwarding hardware, the controllers rely on OpenFlow [10], the de facto standard for the southbound communication in SDN. As described in [9], monitoring is part of the distributed management functionality with the objective to gather information from network devices and subsequently support applications for their decisions. Although of paramount importance, the authors did not elaborate on the technical challenges associated with collecting and disseminating information in a distributed environment.…”