IEEE Softwarization - May 2016
A collection of short technical articles

Mark Your Calendar! IEEE SDN's Flagship Conference Set for June 6-10 in Seoul, Korea

By Eileen Healy, IEEE SDN Co-Chair

Welcome to the 4th issue of the IEEE Softwarization Newsletter. We have another set of timely and thought-provoking articles to keep you abreast of some of the latest thinking around SDN/NFV and how Softwarization is impacting network evolution and more.


SDN in LANs: Programming the Network to Secure IoT Traffic

By Nicolas Le Sauze and Mathieu Boussard, Nokia Bell Labs

In today's world, we are surrounded by more and more connected devices, collecting data and offering services to ease every aspect of our connected lives. Whether it is for work, leisure, health, etc., we will increasingly interact with smart devices that we either own, or that are made accessible to us by third parties as different as friends or smart city providers. However, recent studies have shown that end users are concerned about the privacy and security issues this future is introducing.


SDN Architectural Limitations: Towards a Full Software Network Vision

By Sven van der Meer, Ericsson NM Labs, Athlone, Ireland; and Eduard Grasa, Fundació i2CAT, Barcelona, Spain

In spite of being only a few years old as a technology, Software Defined Networking (SDN) has jumped from research labs to the product portfolio of most of the big networking industry players and a myriad of innovative start-ups. SDN has changed our perception of the network, the same way cloud computing has not long ago done for computing and storage. It has decoupled control software from specialized forwarding hardware by virtualising underlying physical resources and provided (semi-) standardized interfaces to the virtualized hardware resources; allowing for an increased service deployment agility. However, we argue that SDN in its current incarnation is just the beginning of the network softwarisation trend, since it still carries too much heritage from legacy telecommunication network architectures.


ICONA: Inter Cluster ONOS Network Application

By Matteo Gerola, CREATE-NET

Since the beginning of the Software Defined Networking (SDN) revolution, the control plane reliability, scalability and availability were among the major concerns expressed by Service and Cloud Providers. Existing deployments show that standard IP/MPLS networks natively offer fast recovery in the case of failures. Their main limitation lies in the complexity of the distributed control plane, implemented in the forwarding devices. IP/MPLS networks fall short when it comes to design and implementation of new services that require changes to the distributed control protocols and service logic. The SDN architecture, that splits data and control planes, simplifies the introduction of new services, moving the intelligence from the physical devices to a Network Operating System (NOS), also known as a controller, that is in charge of all the forwarding decisions. The NOS is usually considered logically centralized since it cannot introduce any single point of failure in production environments. Several distributed NOS architectures have been proposed recently to guarantee the proper level of redundancy in the control plane: ONIX, Kandoo, HyperFlow to name a few.


IEEE SDN/NFV Standardization

By Niranth Amogh, Huawei; Alex Gelman, Director - IEEE ComSoc Standards Program Development Board; and Mehmet Ulema, Director - IEEE ComSoc Standards Development Board

Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) are being increasingly applied to a variety of communication networks including mobile and computer networks. The key characteristics of SDN and NFV are modularization of hardware and software, virtualization at all levels of network, multi-tenancy via supporting multi user control of resource and provision of strong isolation of control, and centralization of control and programmability.


SDN in NFV Architectural Framework

By Marie-Paule Odini, HPE

With NFV focusing on the virtualization of network functions, and SDN focusing on the decoupling of control and data plane, combining the two is now a hot topic in the telecom community. ETSI NFV has recently published GS NFV-EVE 005 a Report on SDN Usage in NFV Architectural Framework that analyzes architecture, design patterns and use cases to drive some recommendations for the NFV community. Some of these recommendations are already included or investigated for ETSI NFV Release 2 specifications are in progress, and further work may be conducted for other topics. This article provides some highlights of the main topics.

 


 

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If you wish to have an article considered for publication, please contact the Managing Editor at sdn-editor@ieee.org.

 


Past Issues

November 2018

March 2018

January 2018

December 2017

September 2017

July 2017

May 2017

March 2017

January 2017

November 2016

September 2016

July 2016

May 2016

March 2016

January 2016

November 2015


IEEE Softwarization Editorial Board

Laurent Ciavaglia, Editor-in-Chief
Mohamed Faten Zhani, Managing Editor
TBD, Deputy Managing Editor
Syed Hassan Ahmed
Dr. J. Amudhavel
Francesco Benedetto
Korhan Cengiz
Noel Crespi
Neil Davies
Eliezer Dekel
Eileen Healy
Chris Hrivnak
Atta ur Rehman Khan
Marie-Paule Odini
Shashikant Patil
Kostas Pentikousis
Luca Prete
Muhammad Maaz Rehan
Mubashir Rehmani
Stefano Salsano
Elio Salvadori
Nadir Shah
Alexandros Stavdas
Jose Verger