Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Software-defined networking
Summary
Software-defined networking (SDN) technology is an approach to network management that enables dynamic, programmatically efficient network configuration in order to improve network performance and monitoring, in a manner more akin to cloud computing than to traditional network management. SDN is meant to address the static architecture of traditional networks and may be employed to centralize network intelligence in one network component by disassociating the forwarding process of network packets (data plane) from the routing process (control plane). The control plane consists of one or more controllers, which are considered the brain of the SDN network, where the whole intelligence is incorporated. However, centralization has certain drawbacks related to security, scalability and elasticity.
SDN was commonly associated with the OpenFlow protocol (for remote communication with network plane elements for the purpose of determining the path of network packets across network switches) since OpenFlow's emergence in 2011. However, since 2012, proprietary systems have also used the term. These include Cisco Systems' Open Network Environment and Nicira's network virtualization platform.
SD-WAN applies similar technology to a wide area network (WAN).
The history of SDN principles can be traced back to the separation of the control and data plane first used in public switched telephone networks. This provided a manner of simplifying provisioning and management years before the architecture was used in data networks.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) began considering various ways to decouple the control and forwarding functions in a proposed interface standard published in 2004 named Forwarding and Control Element Separation (ForCES). The ForCES Working Group also proposed a companion SoftRouter architecture. Additional early standards from the IETF that pursued separating control from data include the Linux Netlink as an IP services protocol and a path computation element (PCE)-based architecture.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.