Software-Defined Networking: An Evolving Network Architecture—Programmability and Security Perspective

Abstract

Software-defined networking is an evolving network architecture beheading the traditional network architecture focusing its disadvantages in a limited perspective. A couple of decades before, programming and networking were viewed as different domains which today with the lights of SDN bridging themselves together. This is to overcome the existing challenges faced by the networking domain and an attempt to propose cost-efficient effective and feasible solutions. Changes to the existing network architecture are inevitable considering the volume of connected devices and the data being held together. SDN introduces a decoupled architecture and brings customization within the network making it easy to configure, manage, and troubleshoot. This paper focuses on the evolving network architecture, the software-defined networking. Unlike a generic view on the evolving network, which makes work as a review, this work addresses various perspectives of the architecture leaving it an intermediate work in between the review of the literature and implementation, contributing towards factors like the design, programmability, security, security behaviors, and security lapses. This paper also analyses various weak points of the architecture and evolves the attack vectors in each plane leaving a conclusion to further progress towards identifying the impacts of the attacks and proposing mitigation strategies.