IEEE Softwarization - September 2017
A collection of short technical articles

Intent-Based Management and Orchestration of Heterogeneous OpenFlow/IoT SDN Domains

By Walter Cerroni, Chiara Buratti, Simone Cerboni, Gianluca Davoli, Chiara Contoli, Francesco Foresta, Franco Callegati, Roberto Verdone, DEI - University of Bologna, Italy

The recent innovations brought about by network “softwarization” paradigms, such as Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN), foster flexible and cost-effective service provisioning by taking advantage of vendor-independent hardware platforms as well as fully programmable network infrastructures via standardized, open, southbound interfaces (SBIs). End-to-end services provided to customers are typically delivered across different network administrative and/or technological domains, making it a challenging task and, at the same time, an opportunity when SDN/NFV solutions are adopted, because of the more advanced control features offered by such new paradigms. In particular, a very critical aspect to be dealt with is how to achieve unified management and orchestration of end-to-end services across multiple domains. To this purpose, an open, vendor-agnostic, and interoperable northbound interface (NBI) should be defined, through which applications are allowed to control the underlying heterogeneous NFV and SDN infrastructures and take advantage of dynamic service chaining.

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TableVisor 2.0: Towards Full-Featured, Scalable and Hardware-Independent Multi Table Processing

By Stefan Geissler, University of Wuerzburg, Germany; Stefan Herrnleben, University of Wuerzburg, Germany; Robert Bauer, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany; Steffen Gebert, University of Wuerzburg, Germany; Thomas Zinner, University of Wuerzburg, Germany; and Michael Jarschel, Nokia Bell Labs, Germany

The original idea of Software Defined Networking (SDN) is to control a network consisting of COTS (Commercial-Off-The-Shelf) hardware switches by programming their forwarding behavior via a standardized southbound interface such as OpenFlow. However, this vision of a unified interface towards the data plane has not always been held up in practice. SDN-enabled devices are often shipped with different hardware capabilities and configurations, e.g., with a varying number of flow tables or support for certain data plane features. Furthermore, complexity and feature requirements of control plane applications have increased significantly since the SDN concept has first been introduced.

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Overview of RFC7426: SDN Layers and Architecture Terminology

By Evangelos Haleplidis, Mojatatu Networks, Canada

The Software-Defined Networking (SDN) concept became the focus of the main networking research topic in academia after its resurgence in 2008. SDN, in a nutshell, refers to a new approach for network programmability, that is, the capability to initialize, control, change, and manage network resources -and therefore behavior- dynamically via open interfaces.

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SD-WAN Strategy to Address Key Trends and Scalability

By Fan Gu, VeloCloud Networks, Inc.

A Software Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) applies SDN architectural principles to a WAN network, with innovative extensions to focus on the practical realities of the “wide area” part of the network, such as minimizing delays over long distances between geographically dispersed nodes and guaranteeing predictable service quality over dissimilar and unpredictable links.

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SDN and NFV Evolution Towards 5G

By Marie-Paule Odini, HPE

SDN and NFV have now been around for some years with an uptake in telecom network a bit slower than expected but these technologies are definitely shaping 5G as initiated by NGMN. This article will highlight the relationships between SDN, NFV and 5G networks.