Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
through deployments
Masayoshi Kobayashi
a
, Srini Seetharaman
b,
, Guru Parulkar
c
, Guido Appenzeller
d
,
Joseph Little
c
, Johan van Reijendam
c
, Paul Weissmann
b
, Nick McKeown
c
a
NEC Corporation of America, United States
b
Deutsche Telekom, United States
c
Stanford University, United States
d
Big Switch Networks, United States
a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Available online 18 November 2013
Keywords:
OpenFlow
SDN
GENI
Deployments
Experience
a b s t r a c t
Software-dened Networking (SDN) has emerged as a new paradigm of networking that
enables network operators, owners, vendors, and even third parties to innovate and create
new capabilities at a faster pace. The SDN paradigm shows potential for all domains of use,
including data centers, cellular providers, service providers, enterprises, and homes. Over a
three-year period, we deployed SDN technology at our campus and at several other cam-
puses nation-wide with the help of partners. These deployments included the rst-ever
SDN prototype in a lab for a (small) global deployment. The four-phased deployments
and demonstration of new networking capabilities enabled by SDN played an important
role in maturing SDN and its ecosystem. We share our experiences and lessons learned that
have to do with demonstration of SDNs potential; its inuence on successive versions of
OpenFlow specication; evolution of SDN architecture; performance of SDN and various
components; and growing the ecosystem.
2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
Software-dened Networking (SDN) is a newapproach to
networking that has the potential to enable ongoing network
innovationandenablethe networkas a programmable, plug-
gable component of the larger cloud infrastructure. Key as-
pects of SDN include separation of data and control planes;
a uniform vendor-agnostic interface, such as OpenFlow, be-
tweencontrol anddata planes; a logically centralized control
plane, realized using a network OS, that constructs and
presentsalogical mapof theentirenetworktoservices or net-
workcontrol applications ontop; andslicingandvirtualization
of the underlying network. With SDN, a researcher, network
administrator, or third party can introduce a new capability
by writing a software program that simply manipulates the
logical map of a slice of the network.
SDN has been gaining momentum in both the research
communityandindustry. Most networkoperators andown-
ers are actively exploring SDN. For example, Google has
switched over to OpenFlowand SDNfor its inter-datacenter
network [17], and NTT Communications has announced
OpenFlow-based Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) [33]. Sim-
ilarly, many network vendors have announced OpenFlow-
enabled switches as products and have outlined their strat-
egies for SDN[38]. The research community has had several
workshops on SDNduring the past two years, where diverse
SDN research topics have been covered.
In this paper we share our experiences with OpenFlow
and SDN deployments over the past three years in four
chronological phases.
1
The deployments represent a spec-
1389-1286/$ - see front matter 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bjp.2013.10.011