Software defined networks for multitenant, multiplatform applications

Abstract

Network management in virtualized computing domains is a challenging task in the ever-increasing dimensions of user's interaction, network size, and types of applications. Internet of Things (IoT), smart sensing and communicating devices over the IP domain and strong demand of QoS pose multitude of new challenges. The traditional network management is simply unable to keep up with dynamically varying data management and transport requirements in large-scale multitenant networks. The switches and routers in conventional networks have to be reconfigured for changes in flow requirements, often manually. The Software Defined Networks (SDN) decouples the complexity of state distribution from network specifications. The ‘control plane’ manages data flows, routing and forwarding states through vendor neutral interfaces to the switches. The ‘data plane’ uses the underlying systems that forward traffic to the destinations. Multi-platform, multitenant management support for virtualized domains and cloud computing under SDN architecture has been reviewed in this paper. The scalability, controllability, dependability and security issues in SDN have been discussed along with an overview of core-technologies of SDN, like OpenFlow. A model SDN for distributed flow management in an enterprise environment has also been presented. The challenges and future directions of research are also briefly discussed.