Software-defined networking: A novel approach to networks

Abstract

With the rapid change in the network traffic flow, traditional networks need to be innovated. There have been a lot of innovation in devices, application, storage, and computing, but the network remained unrevised. Software-defined networking (SDN) is a new way for the management and operation of networks. With the help of its basic principle of separating the control plane and data plane, it has opened up many ways for revolution in network. A centralized controller in the SDN acts as the vital element. All the information to the data paths or data elements such as network switches/routers is given through southbound application programming interface, and information to the applications such as firewall, load balancer, and business logic is achieved through the northbound application programming interface. The SDN controller is situated in the middle of the architecture in between the network elements and the SDN applications and ultimately makes the flexibility to make many new applications. There are multiple applications which are playing a vital role in networks, but due to the aforementioned challenges in traditional networking, these applications are becoming vendor specific and expensive too. To overcome the situation these applications can be innovated again by using SDN. Although there are many available SDN based applications but in this chapter we are limited to firewall and load balancer. Chapter we will discuss two specific applications as a case of study, which are firewall and load balancer, compare traditional applications and SDN-based applications, and survey and compare related literature.