SDN Approach Research Articles

Tuneman: Customizing Networks to Guarantee Application Bandwidth and Latency

We examine how to provide applications with dedicated bandwidth and guaranteed latency in a programmable mission-critical network. Unlike other SDN approaches such as B4 or SWAN, our system Tuneman optimizes both routes and packet schedules at each node to provide flows with sub-second bandwidth changes. Tuneman uses node-level optimization to compute node schedules in a slotted switch and does dynamic routing using a search procedure with Quality of Service– (QoS) based weights. This allows Tuneman to provide an efficient solution for mission-critical networks that have stringent QoS requirements. We evaluate Tuneman on a telesurgery network using a switch prototype built using FPGAs and also via simulations on India’s Tata Network. For mission-critical networks with multiple QoS levels, Tuneman has comparable or better utilization than SWAN while providing delay bounds guarantees.

Field Trial of Programmable L3 VPN Service Deployment Using SDN-Based Multi-domain Service Provisioning over IP/Optical Networks

Network operators cannot change their foot-print to upgrade the entire network to support SDN from scratch. Hence, network operators adapted the original SDN concept into a hybrid SDN approach to have a pragmatic, evolutionary, and economically viable solution. This article tests an SDN architecture based on a hierarchical structure of a Software-Defined Transport Networking (SDTN) controller, which deals with the end-to-end service provision and topology collection on top of a set of SDN controllers for each technological domain. The authors demonstrate L3/L2 VPN service deployment using an underlay multi-domain IP/Optical network in a field trial. The approach allows a service provider to migrate brownfield scenarios into SDN domains using programmatic interfaces.

Po-Fi: Facilitating innovations on WiFi networks with an SDN approach

Most of softwareized WiFi networks rely on dedicated softwares for realizing novel wireless functionalities. However, such an approach is not flexible enough, and introduces management complexity. On the other hand, the programmable forwarding pipeline, which models packet processing as multiple stages of forwarding rules, exhibits great flexibility in facilitating network innovations, and has been recognized as a consensus for abstracting SDN data plane. In this paper, we present Po-Fi, an architecture for software-defined WiFi networks. Based on Protocol-Oblivious Forwarding (POF), Po-Fi follows the SDN consensus by abstracting WiFi AP as a programmable forwarding pipeline, and provides a rich and unified programmability to enable user to realize novel wireless functionalities with forwarding rules. Comparing with previous approaches, Po-Fi is highly flexible in facilitating WiFi innovations. To show this, we realize a wide range of use cases with Po-Fi, including per-client virtual AP (VAP), seamless mobility, multi-AP MPTCP data transmission, smooth remote AP switching for wireless backhaul, and TDMA MAC scheduling. We implement a Po-Fi prototype with commodity hardware, and evaluate the use cases with real-world experiments. The results show that the Po-Fi facilitated innovations can effectively improve the WiFi network services.

Blockchain-Enabled Multi-Operator Small Cell Network for Beyond 5G Systems

Despite increase in deployment of BS, MNOs are still faced with the daunting challenge of providing adequate coverage and capacity in indoor environments. Furthermore, the trust-less environment in which MNOs operate makes it further challenging to achieve interoperability across carriers. Recently the concept of mOs has emerged as a promising solution through deployment of small cells. However, their success has been severely hampered by the absence of a framework for creating and managing business agreements between key stakeholders, i.e., MNOs and mOs. This article proposes a blockchain-enabled SDN approach for managing radio spectrum access between MNOs using smart contracts over small cell networks. Specifically, our solution uses a smart contract to validate transactions between MNOs. Simulation results show that our solution guarantees seamless handoff and high availability between different operators in contrast to a break in connectivity in the absence of an agreement.

Smart hybrid SDN approach for MPLS VPN management on digital environment

MPLS VPN is growing in front of the other network layer tunneling technologies of the OSI model. The trend related to this technology is justified mainly by the security, the quality of service that it can offer, and especially the routing speed. The main limitation of MPLS VPN is in the deployment complexity; this technology relies on several protocols to establish a tunnel, such as OSPF, BGP, MP-BGP, RSVP, and LDP. Software Defined Network avoids these complexities through the controller entity that supports the establishment of an MPLS VPN tunnel automatically, provided that the equipment to orchestrate is new generation supporting the SDN protocols. However, for budgetary and functional constraints, companies can not completely and immediately change their transport networks by equipment supporting SDN. Hybrid SDN networks address these constraints, providing the ability to orchestrate even equipment that does not support SDN, called a legacy. We propose in this paper a new hybrid intelligent SDN approach for MPLS VPN management in the digital environment. This approach is tested on a network consisting of routers of different manufacturers (Cisco, HP, and Juniper). The proposed approach is accompanied by a WEB graphic tool offering the administrator the possibility to choose the MPLS VPN architecture to deploy (Central Service, Hub-Spoke, and Intranet/Extranet) or customize its own architecture according to the customer’s request. In order to evaluate our model, we subjected it to a scalability test and an evaluation of the quality of experience to measure the satisfaction of the users who tried it.

Energy Efficient Software Defined Networking Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

The real-time properties and operational constraints of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have emerged the need for designing energy efficient routing protocols. Recently, software defined network based WSN (SDN-WSN) emerging technology has offered a significant development by untying control logic plane from the low power sensor nodes. This centralized programmable control still suffers from several configuration challenges in distributed sensors environment. Meta-heuristic based SDN approaches had been proposed for the efficient path selection in WSN but they still suffer from both, exploration and exploitation problems. Therefore, this paper addresses these shortcomings by proposing a meta-heuristic based dolphin echolocation algorithm (DEA) for optimizing route selection in WSNs. Objective function of the DEA algorithm is to consider the residual energy of the nodes for selecting energy efficient routes. The proposed algorithm performance is compared with several meta-heuristic algorithms in terms of energy-consumption, and network throughput parameters.

Experimental Evaluation of a SDN-DMM Architecture

Mobility management has become a great challenge due to the exponential growth in the number of devices that can connect to home or visited networks, and the need for providing seamless mobility in future generation networks. SDN-DMM (Software Defined Network Architecture for Distributed Mobility Management) architecture has been proposed [11], allowing to separate control and data planes, for the distributed mobility management through bidirectional IP flows. This article reports on aspects related to the implementation of SDN-DMM, conducted with metrics as packet loss, throughput and handover latency, considered in a comparison involving traditional routing and SDN-DMM. The results show the SDN approach not only provides the intrinsic benefits of SDN in comparison with traditional architectures, but also deals with the distributed mode of mobility management in heterogeneous access networks in a simplified and efficient way.

Encryption analysis of AES-Cipher Block Chaining performance in Crypto-Wall Ransomware and SDN based mitigation

The arrival of affordable high speed internet and superior computing processors has given the ability to access a novel environment of opportunities and challenges at an individuals fingertips. Sectors of education, administration, business, medical and corporate have been revolutionised by this latest onset of technology. With the arrival of IoT (Internet of Things), the number of devices that are connected to the internet will be higher than ever before. Along with this increase, the diversity of threats propagating on the internet will see a comparable increase. These threats are designed in a way to alter the integrity of the data, embed itself into other programs for further propagation and also to gain monetary compensation. In recent times, the popular malware which has made headlines worldwide is ransomware. This type of malware infection uses complex encryption of user specific files and demands a ransom for retrieval of these files. Modern ransomware behaviour indicates propagation of the malware from the host victim to other computers and shared drives within its network. This paper contains in- detailed analysis of ransomware and the currents trends of this malware. The time taken for CryptoWall ransomware encryption using AES- CBC is observed for various data sizes and a SDN approach for ransomware threat mitigation is discussed.

Towards end-to-end integrated optical packet network: Empirical analysis

Today, the overloaded networks increasingly entail high operational costs but may not generate new revenues accordingly. Legacy network elements are reaching end-of-life and packet-based transport networks are not efficiently optimized. Thus, an efficient migration plan towards an End-to-End Integrated-Optical-Packet-Network (E2-IOPN) is emerging for service providers in access, metro and core networks. This paper reviews various empirical challenges faced by a Service Provider (SP) during the transformation process towards E2-IOPN as well as in the implementation of an as-built plan and high-level design for migrating towards GPON, MPLS-TP, OTN and next-generation DWDM. Then, we propose a SP longer-term strategy based on SDN and NFV approach that will offer rapid end-to-end service provisioning and centralized network control. Such strategy helps SP maintain good profit margin and best customer experience. A cost comparative study shows the benefit and financial impact of introducing new low-cost packet-based technologies to carry legacy as well as new services traffic.

Software-defined networking in cyber-physical systems: A survey

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) rely on networks that interconnect sensors and actuators to perform measurement, supervision and protection functions in different domains, such as transportation and industrial automation control systems. These networks must be able to support mobile wireless CPSs that are demanding new requirements related to flexibility and heterogeneity without compromising the Quality of Service (QoS). However, it is hard to determine, for example, the optimal resource allocation or the most reliable paths without global network information. In this way, the Software-Defined Networking paradigm is being considered as key to overcome such emerging needs. In particular, an SDN controller is able to establish paths between sensors and actuators according to bandwidth, latency, redundancy, and safety considerations. Thus, the goal of this paper is to review the state of the art of SDN approaches applied to mission-critical applications by identifying trends, challenges and opportunities for the potential development of software-defined cyber-physical networks.

AN SDN APPROACH FOR AN ENERGY-EFFICIENT HETEROGENEOUS COMMUNICATION NETWORK IN DISASTER SCENARIOS

Wireless access technologies have been extensively developed aiming to give users the ability to connect to their expected networks anytime, anywhere. This leads to an increment of the number of wireless interfaces integrated into a single mobile device, hence, it allows the device to be able to connect to multiple access networks. However, in some specific cases such as natural disasters, having an uncorrupted and timely information exchanging means is critical for affected victims to survive or to connect to the outside world. This is because the essential network infrastructures in these cases could be destroyed causing a large number of systems to stop working. In that cases, the victims need a heterogeneous communications network in which they can communicate, without a doubt, by using different wireless access technologies, i.e., Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. The network must also be able to smoothly change the access technologies, or called a vertical handover, to ensure QoS for ongoing applications. In addition, the network must have a mechanism to save energy. For hese reasons, an SDN approach, which has been proposed in a previous work, is considered. The performance of the system has been validated by a set of experiments in a real testbed. The obtained results show that the proposed vertical handover can save at least 24.42 per cent of the energy consumed by the wireless communication. The handover delay with different UDP traffic is less than 150ms. Moreover, the network allows a device using Bluetooth to talk with another one using Wi-Fi over a heterogeneous connection where the end-to-end jitter is mainly below 20ms and the packet loss rate is as small as 0.2 per cent.

Orchestration of RAN and Transport Networks for 5G: An SDN Approach

The fifth generation of mobile networks is planned to be commercially available in a few years. The scope of 5G goes beyond introducing new radio interfaces, and will include new services like low-latency industrial applications, as well as new deployment models such as cooperative cells and densification through small cells. An efficient realization of these new features greatly benefit from tight coordination among radio and transport network resources, something that is missing in current networks. In this article, we first present an overview of the benefits and technical requirements of resource coordination across radio and transport networks in the context of 5G. Then, we discuss how SDN principles can bring programmability to both the transport and radio domains, which in turn enables the design of a hierarchical, modular, and programmable control and orchestration plane across the domains. Finally, we introduce two use cases of SDN-based transport and RAN orchestration, and present an experimental implementation of them in a testbed in our lab, which confirms the feasibility and benefits of the proposed orchestration.

An SDN Approach for an Energy Efficient Heterogeneous Communication Network in Disaster Scenarios

Wireless access technologies have been extensively developed aiming to give users the ability to connect to their expected networks anytime, anywhere. This leads to an increment of the number of wireless interfaces integrated into a single mobile device, hence, it allows the device to be able to connect to multiple access networks. However, in some specific cases such as natural disasters, having an uncorrupted and timely information exchanging means is critical for affected victims to survive or to connect to the outside world. This is because the essential network infrastructures in these cases could be destroyed causing a large number of systems to stop working. In that cases, the victims need a heterogeneous communications network in which they can communicate, without a doubt, by using different wireless access technologies, i.e., Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. The network must also be able to smoothly change the access technologies, or called a vertical handover, to ensure QoS for ongoing applications. In addition, the network must have a mechanism to save energy. For hese reasons, an SDN approach, which has been proposed in a previous work, is considered. The performance of the system has been validated by a set of experiments in a real testbed. The obtained results show that the proposed vertical handover can save at least 24.42 per cent of the energy consumed by the wireless communication. The handover delay with different UDP traffic is less than 150ms. Moreover, the network allows a device using Bluetooth to talk with another one using Wi-Fi over a heterogeneous connection where the end-to-end jitter is mainly below 20ms and the packet loss rate is as small as 0.2 per cent.

Software Defined Networking for Flexible and Green Energy Internet

Energy Internet is a vision of future power systems, which will achieve highly efficient interconnection among various types of energy resources, storage, and loads, and enable P2P energy delivery on a large scale. To enhance the flexibility and efficiency of Energy Internet, this article employs the methodology of SDN in Energy Internet and proposes an SDEI architecture. In the SDEI, the control, data, and energy planes are separated. The control plane dynamically reconfigures the data and energy planes and achieves flexible cooperation between them. We then focus on applying an SDN approach to energy router networking, and build a hierarchical energy control architecture that can implement the programmability of energy flow and allow P2P energy delivery from a high-level view. Additionally, we present a case study of future EVs, for which two applications within the SDEI framework are proposed to improve energy efficiency and green energy utilization.

Short-Sighted Routing, or When Less is More

Due to the high costs of wide area links, traffic engineering is frequently used to optimize wide area networks' performance. In recent years, architectures based on software defined networking approaches are being proposed as better ways of implementing network control and management. However, network optimization requires timely acquisition of statistics on network traffic demands by SDN controllers, as well as timely reconfiguration of network paths. Both goals may only be achieved with a scalable control plane. In this article, we present an approach meant to trade complexity and scalability of the control plane for routing optimality. Our experiments suggest that the performance of provider networks is nearly optimal, even when load balancing parameters have been computed using a slightly outdated vision of traffic demands. We named this approach short-sighted routing (SSR). Our results also show that performance optimality in many provider networks that use load balancing over several paths is not affected in a significant way by relaxing the timeliness of network traffic demands acquisition and the corresponding load balancing reconfiguration. This has allowed us to conclude that dynamic centralized network optimization and management, in accordance with an SDN approach, is also quite realistic in service provider networks.

When ICN meets C-RAN for HetNets: an SDN approach

With ever growing mobile Internet and the explosion of its applications, users are experiencing abundant services from different content providers via different network service providers in the heterogeneous network. The information-centric network (ICN) advocates getting rid of the current host-centric network protocol because information dissemination rather than end-to-end communication contributes to the majority of today's network traffic. Furthermore, it is better for network entities to converge as a whole in order to take advantage of open, scalable, and smart traffic transmission. The cloud radio access network is one of the emerging architecture evolutions on the wireless side for easier infrastructure deployment and network management. Therefore, when the information-centric network meets the C-RAN in the Het-Net, it is worthwhile and consequential to integrate ICN protocol with C-RAN architecture to achieve more efficient communication and information management. Moreover, SDN has been recognized as another promising architecture evolution to achieve the flexibility and reconfigurability of dense HetNets; its inherent advantage lies in global uniform control of the wired network. Thus, any of ICN, C-RAN and SDN is the complementary to the others. In this article, we contribute to a fresh proposal for and elaboration of the integration of the ICN, CRAN, and SDN for the HetNet to achieve a win-win situation. The vision of the proposed system is demonstrated, followed by the advantages and challenges. We further present a hybrid system in a large-scale wireless heterogeneous campus network.

Cross-layer resource orchestration for cloud service delivery: A seamless SDN approach

One of the main challenges of cloud-based service provisioning is to deploy a coordinated control of both application- and network-layer resources in order to provide adaptive service data delivery and adequate user service experiences. In this work we propose a signaling framework architecture for cross-layer resource orchestration, where service awareness provided by session control is effectively combined with the flexibility of software-defined network control. Following a hands-on approach, the proposed solution takes advantage of existing and commonly deployed technologies aiming at an incremental deployment of the software-defined control mechanisms for the purpose of cross-functional service orchestration. The signaling framework is presented and validated through experimental activities carried out on a test-bed reproducing a realistic cloud-based service scenario. Results are compared against an analytical model that allows to investigate and quantify the sensitivity of the cloud-based service performance to the most relevant system parameters. The study demonstrates that a critical role is played by the limitations of the response time of real devices such as commercial routers, and highlights how orchestration functions can mitigate the effect of such limitations while addressing scalability of the overall system.

Initial-stage examination of a testbed for the big data transfer over parallel links. The SDN approach

The transfer of Big Data over a computer network is an important and unavoidable operation in the past, present, and in any feasible future. A large variety of astronomical projects produces the Big Data. There are a number of methods to transfer the data over a global computer network (Internet) with a range of tools. In this paper we consider the transfer of one piece of Big Data from one point in the Internet to another, in general over a long-range distance: many thousand kilometers. Several free of charge systems to transfer the Big Data are analyzed here. The most important architecture features are emphasized, and the idea is discussed to add the SDN OpenFlow protocol technique for fine-grain tuning of the data transfer process over several parallel data links.

SoftMobile: control evolution for future heterogeneous mobile networks

Heterogeneous mobile networks, HMNs, with flexible spectrum use, densified cell deployment, and multi-layer multiple types of radio access technologies, are expected to be key to meeting the 1000 times increase of mobile data traffic in 2020 and beyond. The increasing complexity in HMNs renders the control and coordination of networks a challenging task. The control frameworks of current cellular networks, which were previously designed for sparse network deployment, hit the wall for HMNs. HMNs need good separation of control and data planes, and call for novel control methods to handle the highly complex dynamics therein. In this article, we first briefly review the control planes of 2G to 4G cellular networks, and then identify their constraints to support HMNs. We analyze the complexity in HMNs and examine enabling control technologies for HMNs. We believe new thinking is needed for efficient control of HMNs. SDN is a promising technology to solve complex control problems in the Internet. Principle-based control methods applied in SDN are promising to solve control problems in HMNs. Several SDN approaches have been proposed for mobile networks. However, most of them are targeted at mobile core networks. We propose an SDNbased control framework named SoftMobile to coordinate complex radio access in HMNs. The main features of SoftMobile are low-layer abstraction, separation of control and data planes, and network-wide high-layer programmable control. Important research problems in SDN for mobile networks are highlighted. We believe SDN for mobile networks will be the controlling evolution of future HMNs.

An SDN Approach: Quality of Service using Big Switch’s Floodlight Open-source Controller

Quality of Service in today’s packet-switched networks have various effecting factors that include both technical and non-technical aspects. Such factors include the reliability of service, availability of service, delay, scalability, effectiveness, grade of service etc. These factors play an important role into how a particular network may treat and handle packets within a given network. Properties of packet-switched networks can cause low throughput, dropped packets, corruption errors, latency, jitter, disordered delivery and more. The role of SDN allows for network operating systems to gain greater governance of the control plane within a given network. Using this SDN approach and the specifications provided by OpenFlow (OF) 1.0[1] we show an approach to Quality of Service that is managed and defined by a centralized network controller.