Abstract
Emerging network services and subsequent growth in the networking infrastructure have gained tremendous momentum in recent years. Application performance requiring rapid real-time network provisioning, optimized traffic management, and virtualization of shared resources has induced the conceptualization and adoption of new networking models. Software defined networking (SDN), one of the predominant and relatively new networking paradigms, seeks to simplify network management by decoupling network control logic from the underlying hardware and introduces real-time network programmability enabling innovation. The present work reviews the state of the art in software defined networking providing a historical perspective on complementary technologies in network programmability and the inherent shortcomings which paved the way for SDN. The SDN architecture is discussed along with popular protocols, platforms, and existing simulation and debugging solutions. Furthermore, a detailed analysis is presented around recent SDN development and deployment avenues ranging from mobile communications and data centers to campus networks and residential environments. The review concludes by highlighting implementation challenges and subsequent research directions being pursued in academia and industry to address issues related to application performance, control plane scalability and design, security, and interdomain connectivity in the context of SDN.
Highlights
Software defined networking (SDN) is a relatively new paradigm introduced in the world of computer networking promising a fundamental shift in the way network configuration and real-time traffic management is performed
Technologies supporting the centralization of network control, introducing programmability and virtualization, have, existed prior to SDN and over the years matured to varying degrees of adoption among operators catering for individual application requirements
The resulting performance of the proposed architectures significantly improves the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) for the end users as well as the spectral efficiency at each access point (AP) in comparison with conventional approaches [154]
Summary
Software defined networking (SDN) is a relatively new paradigm introduced in the world of computer networking promising a fundamental shift in the way network configuration and real-time traffic management is performed. The present paper highlights the state of the art in software defined networking by providing a brief historical perspective of the field as well as detailing the SDN architecture. Compared to similar work in [3, 7,8,9,10] describing state of the art in SDN, recent deployments and operational challenges are discussed in detail to give readers a comprehensive understanding of evolving implementation avenues and subsequent studies examining scalability and real-time latency, robustness, design updates, and security challenges in software defined networking.
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