Designing a RESTful Northbound Interface for Incompatible Software Defined Network Controllers

Abstract

In Software Defined Networking, applications often need to communicate with network controllers to query or modify the current state of the network. However, there is currently no standard northbound interface that allows this communication to occur. Instead, each Software Defined Networking implementation defines its own interface, meaning applications typically need to be modified to allow them to work with different controllers. In this paper we present a high-level design for a REST-like reactive northbound interface which would allow applications to be written once and then work with multiple otherwise-incompatible controllers.