Towards Resource-Efficient Application-Controlled Software Defined Networks

Abstract

Network management systems (NMS) need to support a wide range of application requirements while ensuring an efficient use of networking resources. Application control of Software Defined Networking (SDN) promises to drastically reduce OPEX and increase flexibility of NMS by automatically translating application requirements into network policies and subsequently into network behavior. The current research in this area focuses mainly on top-down approaches aiming at expressiveness, generality, and control plane resource efficiency. However, the expressive power and flexibility of OpenFlow, a widely used SDN implementation, comes at the cost of high complexity when high-level policies are automatically translated into OpenFlow rules, which can lead to an inefficient use of data plane resources. To counter this problem, this paper proposes a bottom-up approach to application-controlled SDN which aims to leverage scenario-and application-specific information for optimization. Thereby, the proposed approach is able to satisfy diverse application requirements and use the available data plane resources more efficiently than comparable approaches.