Software Defined Networking Domains Research Articles

Integration of Interdomain Flow-Rule in Software-Defined Networks for Embedded Internet of Things Devices

Software-defined networking (SDN) is an evolving technology providing proper segregation between the control part and data-forwarding domain of network devices. The expansion of the Internet of Things (IoTs) and embedded mobile devices increases the volume of traffic at the network backbone and causes processing costs in the control plane. This directly affects the Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) of the switches because insufficient space makes it more challenging to manage the flow-entries. In this situation, providing services to specific users who newly authenticate after the successful handoff from the previous SDN domain is challenging. This paper proposes a method for implanting the users’ primary domain’s flow-rules in the serving SDN domain. As the TCAM is already suffering from a short space, it is hard to handle the flow-tables of multiple SDN domains in limited TCAM storage. The SDN-based Integration of the Interdomain Flow-rule in the SDN (IIF-SDN) scheme maximizes the proficiency of the switches by effectively storing flow-table and flow-entries. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is benchmarked with proactive and reactive SDN approaches.

A Hybrid Software and Hardware SDN Simulation Testbed

In recent years, the software-defined networking (SDN) paradigm has been deployed in various types of networks, including wireless sensor networks (WSN), wide area networks (WAN) and data centers. Given the wide range of SDN domain applicability and the large-scale environments where the paradigm is being deployed, creating a full real test environment is a complex and costly task. To address these problems, software-based simulations are employed to validate the proposed solutions before they are deployed in real networks. However, simulations are constrained by relying on replicating previously saved logs and datasets and do not use real time hardware data. The current article addresses this limitation by creating a novel hybrid software and hardware SDN simulation testbed where data from real hardware sensors are directly used in a Mininet emulated network. The article conceptualizes a new approach for expanding Mininet's capabilities and provides implementation details on how to perform simulations in different contexts (network scalability, parallel computations and portability). To validate the design proposals and highlight the benefits of the proposed hybrid testbed solution, specific scenarios are provided for each design idea. Furthermore, using the proposed hybrid testbed, new datasets can be easily generated for specific scenarios and replicated in more complex research.

BSD-Guard: A Collaborative Blockchain-Based Approach for Detection and Mitigation of SDN-Targeted DDoS Attacks

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) enhances the flexibility and programmability of networks by separating control plane and data plane. The logically centralized control mechanism makes the control plane vulnerable in both single and multiple controller scenarios. Malicious third parties can exploit vulnerabilities of reactive forwarding mode to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against SDN controllers. Unfortunately, existing DoS/DDoS solutions under single controller can not afford effective performance under multiple controllers due to the absence of cooperative detection and mitigation. To solve the above problem, we propose a blockchain-based SDN-targeted DDoS defense framework (BSD-Guard) that can provide cooperative detection and mitigation mechanism to protect SDN controllers. BSD-Guard introduces a blockchain-based secure middle plane between control plane and data plane. The secure middle plane calculates the suspect rate of new flows based on the collected packets’ information and reports suspect lists to blockchain for immutably storing and sharing. Besides, the smart contract deployed on blockchain in advance constitutes collaborative defense strategies based on the suspect lists reported from multiple SDN domains. When receiving defense strategies, the secure middle plane converts them to specific flow table actions and installs actions into relevant switches. The experimental results indicate that BSD-Guard can efficiently detect DoS/DDoS attacks in multiple controllers scenario and issue precise defensive strategies near the source of attack by identifying the attack path.

Survey on application programming interfaces in software defined networks and network function virtualization

In the world of service-oriented businesses the deployment of services is of utmost importance. On the Web, the service-oriented business has a major impact through Web Application Program Interfaces (APIs). In the field of Web applications, majority of the applications run on the Web/Internet APIs. These APIs are dependent on architecture styles such as Representational State Transfer (REST) and Remote Procedure Call (RPC). Over a decade, REST is widely used for architectural style in API design followed by RPC. These styles are used extensively in various domains. This paper presents the survey of such APIs in the world of Software-Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). The main contributions of the paper is to provide a ready reference for developing effective and efficient orchestration approaches towards micro services in SDN and NFV domains. The survey aims to help practitioners and researchers in this field to follow guidelines and standards for designing higher quality services.

Software-defined networks for resource allocation in cloud computing: A survey

Cloud computing has a shared set of resources, including physical servers, networks, storage, and user applications. Resource allocation is a critical issue for cloud computing, especially in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). The decision-making process in the cloud computing network is non-trivial as it is handled by switches and routers. Moreover, the network concept drifts resulting from changing user demands are among the problems affecting cloud computing. The cloud data center needs agile and elastic network control functions with control of computing resources to ensure proper virtual machine (VM) operations, traffic performance, and energy conservation. Software-Defined Network (SDN) proffers new opportunities to blueprint resource management to handle cloud services allocation while dynamically updating traffic requirements of running VMs. The inclusion of an SDN for managing the infrastructure in a cloud data center better empowers cloud computing, making it easier to allocate resources. In this survey, we discuss and survey resource allocation in cloud computing based on SDN. It is noted that various related studies did not contain all the required requirements. This study is intended to enhance resource allocation mechanisms that involve both cloud computing and SDN domains. Consequently, we analyze resource allocation mechanisms utilized by various researchers; we categorize and evaluate them based on the measured parameters and the problems presented. This survey also contributes to a better understanding of the core of current research that will allow researchers to obtain further information about the possible cloud computing strategies relevant to IaaS resource allocation.

GlobeSnap: An Efficient Globally Consistent Statistics Collection for Software-Defined Networks

Software defined networking (SDN) controller requires crucial statistics like flow-wise statistics from the switches to make decisions related to routing, load balancing, and QoS provisioning. These statistics, when viewed across the switches are likely to be inconsistent if a specific order is not enforced while collecting statistics. Collecting consistent statistics requires coordination among all the participating switches. A few approaches in the literature collect globally consistent statistics of a network in the SDN domain. However, these approaches are not time-efficient, robust, and synchronous for OpenFlow based networks. We propose, GlobeSnap, a time-efficient, robust, and synchronous method to collect globally consistent statistics for OpenFlow networks. GlobeSnap collects consistent statistics for all flows in a single round and is therefore, time-efficient. Moreover, GlobeSnap is robust since it resumes the statistics collection process from where it left in case of interruption. GlobeSnap also provides a near-synchronous snapshot of statistics of the switches traversed by a given flow. We also propose a mechanism to persistently store states in OpenFlow based networks using registers, multiple flow tables, and multiple pipelines. We find that GlobeSnap outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in consistency evaluation. Further we present two use-cases which are sensitive to inconsistent flow statistics, that is, computing packet loss and identifying bottleneck links, to show the time-efficiency, robustness, and synchronicity of GlobeSnap. GlobeSnap provides 100% consistency in OpenFlow based SDN networks. Whereas the existing methods achieve a maximum of 59.89% consistency.

A Cross-Domain Service Function Chain Deployment Scheme Based on Bargaining Game

Software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) technologies provide support for service function chain (SFC) deployment. As the scale of a network expands, SDN domains are maintained and managed by their respective network operators. When deploying an SFC in multiple domains, to protect the privacy of each domain is challenging. We propose a cross-domain SFC deployment scheme based on a bargaining game. We establish an effective cross-domain service chain system model and combine resource consumption cost and load balance to translate SFC deployment to an optimization problem. A bargaining game model is established so as to reasonably optimize these contradictory parameters. We solve the model by an improved imperialist competition algorithm and obtain the optimal node mapping relationship. Experimental results show that our method performs better than the current one in terms of network load balancing and mapping overhead and has better scalability.

Energy efficient network service deployment across multiple SDN domains

The emergence of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) enables flexible service provisioning and deployment. However, with the continuous expansion of network scale and sharp increasing of end users, how to flexibly provide network services across multiple SDN domains for users is becoming a critical issue. A major challenge in the multi-domain network service provisioning is the network service deployment method taking into account energy efficiency. In this paper, we study the problem of how to optimally deploy network services across multiple SDN domains with the target of saving energy while achieving the load balancing of multi-domain networks. Specifically, firstly, we propose a novel multi-domain network service deployment framework by integrating SDN architecture and NFV technology, which can intelligently deploy virtual network functions (VNFs) into multi-domain networks. Secondly, we formulate this problem as a multi-objective optimization model to achieve the minimization of energy consumption and load balancing of multi-domain networks. Furthermore, we present a heuristic network service deployment algorithm to solve it. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that the proposed heuristic service deployment algorithm is efficient and outperforms comparison algorithms in terms of energy consumption and load balancing degree.

A Novel SDN Architecture for IoT Security

Describes the term Internet of Things (IoT) security architecture based on Software Defined Networking (SDN). In this context, building on SDN works with or without infrastructure. This is called the SDN domain. This work describes the mechanics of the proposed architecture and reduces the chances of using SDN to achieve more effective and flexible network security. It outlined the issues associated with current SDN security applications and introduced a new IoT system plan. This document has discussed the management of Internet access for specific networks and monitoring of global traffic. Finally, it describes the choice of architecture for SDN using OpenFlow and discusses the resulting results.

SDN-Based Internet of Autonomous Vehicles: An Energy-Efficient Approach for Controller Placement

The rapid advancement of the Internet of Things is expected to play a critical role in future intelligent transportation systems. This technology utilizes advanced information and communication technologies to enhance the operational capabilities of the vehicles and is often referred to as IoAV. More importantly, the increasing usage of sensors and other technologies generates vast amounts of data and information to be exchanged between AVs. Since the wireless connectivity between AVs is constantly expanding, the transmission of data is expected to pose several challenges to the conventional wireless networks, including resource utilization, network optimization, quality of service, and so on. To overcome these challenges, software-defined networking (SDN) has emerged as a powerful technology. This article presents a composite architecture named SD-IoAV for the integration of SDN with IoAV. This integration is not straightforward because SD-IoAV is geographically dispersed by nature. An efficient technique to manage the underlying communications is to deploy multiple SDN controllers across the widely dispersed SDN domains. This is referred to as the controller placement problem (CPP). Thus, the primary focus of this work is to explore CPP in the context of SD-IoAV as a special case of energy minimization and load balancing under latency restrictions. In this context, for large networks, the number of variables increases exponentially, which in turn escalates the complexity of the problem manifold. Hence, to deduce a near optimal solution for large networks, a heuristic approach based on the incremental expansion of candidate space is proposed. The simulation results have been carried out in MATLAB, and the obtained results show that the proposed scheme attains higher energy savings and better load capacity management compared to an existing technique, that is, improved performance by 18.73 and 9.42 percent, respectively.

Dynamic network service deployment across multiple SDN domains

AbstractThe integration of software defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) is a promising approach to support flexible service deployment and provisioning. In particular, NFV enables a network service to be represented as one network service function chain, which is composed of several virtual network functions in a specific order. However, with regard to service provisioning in multidomain SDN networks, virtual network functions are deployed in several different SDN domains due to limited resource capacity of each SDN domain. It results in the network service deployment complexity increase and causes additional operating cost. On the other hand, most current network service deployment proposals are limited to static user request scenarios. How to effectively deploy network service across multiple SDN domains to satisfy dynamic service demands of end users is a challenging problem. To address the aforementioned challenge, in this paper, we study the problem of dynamic network service deployment across multiple SDN domains. Specifically, we first design a novel service deployment framework to support dynamic deployment and optimization of virtual network function in multidomain SDN networks. Then, we formulate the problem as a multiobjective optimization problem with the target of jointly minimizing resource consumption cost and operating cost. Furthermore, we transform the multiobjective optimization problem into a single objective optimization model and present an efficient heuristic service deployment approach to solve it by leveraging Dijkstra algorithm. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed service deployment method is efficient and outperforms comparison methods in terms of service rejection ratio, resource cost, and operating cost.

Novel network services for supporting big data science research

Abstract To interconnect research facilities across wide geographic areas, network operators deploy science networks, also referred to as Research and Education (R&E) networks. These networks allow experimenters to establish dedicated network connections between research facilities for transferring large amounts of data. Recently, R&E networks have started using Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Software-Defined Exchanges (SDX) for deploying these connections. AtlanticWave/SDX is a response to the growing demand to support end-to-end network services spanning multiple SDN domains. However, requesting these services is a challenging task for domain-expert scientists, because the interfaces of the R&E networks have been developed by network operators for network operators. In this paper, we propose interfaces that allow domain-expert scientists to reserve resources of the scientific network using abstractions that focus on their data transfer needs for scientific workflow management. Recent trends in the networking field pursue better interfaces for requesting network services (e.g., intent-based networking). Although intents are sufficient for the needs of network operations, they are not abstract enough in most cases to be used by domain-expert scientists. This is an issue we are addressing in the AtlanticWave/SDX design: network operators and domain-expert scientists will have their own interfaces focusing on their specific needs.

A Policy-Based Security Architecture for Software-Defined Networks

As networks expand in size and complexity, they pose greater administrative and management challenges. Software-defined networks (SDNs) offer a promising approach to meeting some of these challenges. In this paper, we propose a policy-driven security architecture for securing end-to-end services across multiple SDN domains. We develop a language-based approach to design security policies that are relevant for securing SDN services and communications. We describe the policy language and its use in specifying security policies to control the flow of information in a multi-domain SDN. We demonstrate the specification of fine-grained security policies based on a variety of attributes, such as parameters associated with users and devices/switches, context information, such as location and routing information, and services accessed in SDN as well as security attributes associated with the switches and controllers in different domains. An important feature of our architecture is its ability to specify path- and flow-based security policies that are significant for securing end-to-end services in SDNs. We describe the design and the implementation of our proposed policy-based security architecture and demonstrate its use in scenarios involving both intra- and inter-domain communications with multiple SDN controllers. We analyze the performance characteristics of our architecture as well as discuss how our architecture is able to counteract various security attacks. The dynamic security policy-based approach and the distribution of corresponding security capabilities intelligently as a service layer that enables flow-based security enforcement and protection of multitude of network devices against attacks are important contributions of this paper.

DASH-QoS: A scalable network layer service differentiation architecture for DASH over SDN

As one of the key technologies residing in the future Internet concepts, Software Defined Networking (SDN) makes it possible to develop application-centric flow routing strategies. Thanks to the benefits offered by the SDN architecture, the performance of multimedia communication applications can be improved by developing application-centric flow routing strategies. Recently, MPEG-DASH standard which allows rate adaptation over HTTP has become popular. In this work, we present an architecture that provides increase in received quality of DASH clients running over an SDN domain. Within this architecture, we propose an optimization model which determines the streaming paths of the video packets of the clients. We also define different types of user classes and provide a guaranteed service and fairness among the users of the same class. Furthermore, we created a heuristic algorithm to facilitate the scalability of the solution. The simulation results show that, by considering the output of the optimization model and dynamically changing the routing paths in an ISP, the video quality offered to the DASH clients is significantly improved and a certain level of service guarantee is provided.

SDN Based End-to-End Inter-Domain Routing Mechanism for Mobility Management and Its Evaluation.

Nowadays, due to the widespread usage of mobile devices and wireless network technologies, we can use various ICT services almost anytime, anywhere even if we are changing our location at that moment. Therefore, mobility management technology have been attracting attention. This technology is to keep communication alive even when a mobile node (MN), which is communicating with the server or some nodes, moves to another network domain. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is used for mobility management to realize effective intra-domain routing that optimizes routes when an MN moves inside an SDN domain. However, many of the approaches mainly focus on intra-domain routing and it is difficult to optimize inter-domain route. In this paper, we focus on this routing optimization problem and propose an SDN based end-to-end routing mechanism specified for mobility management. The proposed routing mechanism can optimize an end-to-end route based on various parameters such as bandwidth, number of domains, and flow operations for mobility after an MN has moved across SDN domains. We carried out some simulational experimentations to evaluate the effect of proposal. It is shown that the proposed routing mechanism can reduce communication delay and enhance network performance. Thus, the proposed routing mechanism can realize effective ICT services.

A Dynamic QoS Negotiation Mechanism Between Wired and Wireless SDN Domains

Flows in software defined networking (SDN) can pass through multiple domains having separate controllers. A domain is interpreted as part of the network topology under a SDN controller. This necessitates negotiation between various domains, to meet the QoS requirements of flows. These QoS negotiations may be static or dynamic. The SDN domains may be wired or wireless. Though, there have been efforts in the past to define inter-domain QoS negotiations for wired networks using SDN, to the best our knowledge, not much headway has been made when both wireless and wired domains are involved. In this paper, we consider a case where flows connect devices passing through a wired and a wireless domain having separate SDN controllers, and propose a novel QoS negotiation mechanism between them. First, we define a generic mechanism to map QoS parameters from one domain to the other. We then, define utilities for both the domains based on the QoS parameters of flows, and model our proposed mechanism as a mixed integer program. We observe that the problem is NP-complete, and propose a branch and bound -based algorithm to maximize the utility of the wireless domain, and evaluate the same for the wired part. Results indicate, as the resources provided to the flows in the wired domain varies dynamically, the wireless domain accordingly modifies the flows, satisfying their minimum/maximum QoS requirements under different scenarios. Conversely, this also means that resources in wired domain get adjusted, when wireless counterpart changes flow parameters based on wireless channel conditions. Further, the results reveal that smaller granularity of increment/decrement steps of QoS parameters satisfy flow requirements efficiently.

Distributed controllers multi-granularity security communication mechanism for software-defined networking

For the multi-domain software defined network (SDN), different controllers are not able to directly communicate with each other due to the different distances among control planes. Therefore, the exchange of information among different domains is generally unsecure. The main contribution of this paper can be summarized into two parts. Firstly, architecture of multi-granularity security controller is proposed, which includes a basic control module and a multi-granularity security customized module. Secondly, a secure communication mechanism is proposed for distributed controller, where a prototype of this mechanism is implemented. In particular, this mechanism can make use of the border switch as inter-domain agents, where special packets are used by the controller to send messages to the secure tunnel. A two-step authentication of the controller can be provided by inter-domain agents and digital certificates. The experimental results demonstrate that the distributed controller secure communication mechanism is capable of effectively improving the security of SDN domain.

Scalable SDN architecture with distributed placement of controllers for WAN

SummaryBy separating control plane from data plane, software‐defined network (SDN) adopts centralized controllers to manage data flows in the network. Nevertheless, the rapid growth of network service traffic requires a large number of controllers, reducing network performance due to the scalability constraint. Therefore, we consider distributed placement of controllers in wide‐area network to construct a scalable SDN architecture, by taking service traffics, traffic propagation delay, and load balancing into account. Specifically, we first partition the network into several small sections (named SDN domains) and then place the least amount of controllers to a proper node in each domain. The architecture provides a control channel to deliver requested messages for each SDN domain, so it reduces the link delay (which is assumed to be proportional to the physical length of the link) between switches and SDN controllers. Unfortunately, it also introduces extra latency among controller sets at different SDN domain. Accordingly, we formulate an integer linear program to optimize network cost and performance by considering all those conflicting factors and propose an efficient heuristic algorithm called distributed SDN placement to solve the problem. Simulation results confirm that our proposed heuristic distributed SDN placement can achieve suboptimal solutions as compared with the integer linear program results.

CentFlow: Centrality-Based Flow Balancing and Traffic Distribution for Higher Network Utilization

Next-generation networks (NGNs) are embracing two key principles of software defined networking (SDN) paradigm functional segregation of control and forwarding plane, and logical centralization of the control plane. A centralized control enhances the network management significantly by regulating the traffic distribution dynamically and effectively. An eagle-eye view of the entire topology opens up the opportunity for an SDN controller to refine the routing. Optimizing the network utilization in terms of throughput is majorly dependent on the routing decisions. Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) and Intermediate System to Intermediate System (IS-IS) are well-known traditional link state routing protocols proven with operation over operator networks for a long time. However, these classical protocols deployed distributively fall short of expectation in addressing the current routing issues due to the lack of a holistic view of the network topology and situation, whereas handling enormous traffic and user quality of experience (QoE) requirements are getting critical. IP routing in NGN is widely expected to be supported by SDN to enhance the network utilization in terms of throughput. We propose a novel routing algorithm–CentFlow, for an SDN domain to boost up the network utilization. The proposed weight functions in CentFlow achieve smart traffic distribution by detecting highly utilized nodes depending on the centrality measures and the temporal node degree that changes based on node utilization. Furthermore, the frequently selected edges are penalized thereby augmenting the flow balancing and dispersion. CentFlow reaps greater benefits on an SDN controller than the classical OSPF due to its comprehensive view of the network. Experimental results show that CentFlow enhances the utilization of up to 62% of nodes and 49% of links, respectively, compared to an existing Dijkstra algorithm-based routing scheme in SDN. Furthermore, nearly 6.5% more flows are processed networkwide.

A K self-adaptive SDN controller placement for wide area networks

As a novel architecture, software-defined networking (SDN) is viewed as the key technology of future networking. The core idea of SDN is to decouple the control plane and the data plane, enabling centralized, flexible, and programmable network control. Although local area networks like data center networks have benefited from SDN, it is still a problem to deploy SDN in wide area networks (WANs) or large-scale networks. Existing works show that multiple controllers are required in WANs with each covering one small SDN domain. However, the problems of SDN domain partition and controller placement should be further addressed. Therefore, we propose the spectral clustering based partition and placement algorithms, by which we can partition a large network into several small SDN domains efficiently and effectively. In our algorithms, the matrix perturbation theory and eigengap are used to discover the stability of SDN domains and decide the optimal number of SDN domains automatically. To evaluate our algorithms, we develop a new experimental framework with the Internet2 topology and other available WAN topologies. The results show the effectiveness of our algorithm for the SDN domain partition and controller placement problems.