Software-defined networking
Software-defined networking technology is an approach to network management that enables dynamic, programmatically efficient network configuration in order to improve network performance and monitoring, making it more like cloud computing than traditional network management. SDN is meant to address the fact that the static architecture of traditional networks is decentralized and complex while current networks require more flexibility and easy troubleshooting. SDN attempts to centralize network intelligence in one network component by disassociating the forwarding process of network packets from the routing process. 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, the intelligent centralization has its own drawbacks when it comes to security, scalability and elasticity and this is the main issue of SDN.
SDN was commonly associated with the OpenFlow protocol since the latter's emergence in 2011. However, since 2012 OpenFlow for many companies is no longer an exclusive solution, they added proprietary techniques. These include Cisco Systems' Open Network Environment and Nicira's network virtualization platform.
SD-WAN applies similar technology to a wide area network.
SDN technology is currently available for industrial control applications that require extremely fast failover. One company boasts 100x Faster Failover for Mission-critical processes along with the elimination of certain Cyber Vulnerabilities that are associated with traditional network management switches.
Research of SDN continues as many emulators are being developed for research purposes, like vSDNEmul, EstiNet, Mininet etc.
History
The history of SDN principles can be traced back to the separation of the control and data plane first used in the public switched telephone network as a way to simplify provisioning and management well before this architecture began to be used in data networks.The Internet Engineering Task Force began considering various ways to decouple the control and forwarding functions in a proposed interface standard published in 2004 appropriately named "Forwarding and Control Element Separation". 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 -Based Architecture.
These early attempts failed to gain traction for two reasons. One is that many in the Internet community viewed separating control from data to be risky, especially owing to the potential for a failure in the control plane. The second is that vendors were concerned that creating standard application programming interfaces between the control and data planes would result in increased competition.
The use of open-source software in split control/data plane architectures traces its roots to the Ethane project at Stanford's computer sciences department. Ethane's simple switch design led to the creation of OpenFlow. An API for OpenFlow was first created in 2008. That same year witnessed the creation of NOX—an operating system for networks.
Work on OpenFlow continued at Stanford, including with the creation of testbeds to evaluate the use of the protocol in a single campus network, as well as across the WAN as a backbone for connecting multiple campuses. In academic settings there were a few research and production networks based on OpenFlow switches from NEC and Hewlett-Packard; as well as based on Quanta Computer whiteboxes, starting from about 2009.
Beyond academia, the first deployments were by Nicira in 2010 to control OVS from Onix, co-developed with NTT and Google. A notable deployment was Google's B4 deployment in 2012. Later Google acknowledged their first OpenFlow with Onix deployments in their Datacenters at the same time. Another known large deployment is at China Mobile.
The Open Networking Foundation was founded in 2011 to promote SDN and OpenFlow.
At the 2014 Interop and Tech Field Day, software-defined networking was demonstrated by Avaya using shortest path bridging and OpenStack as an automated campus, extending automation from the data center to the end device, removing manual provisioning from service delivery.
Concept
SDN architectures decouple network control and forwarding functions, enabling the network control to become directly programmable and the underlying infrastructure to be abstracted from applications and network services.The OpenFlow protocol can be used in SDN technologies. The SDN architecture is:
- Directly programmable: Network control is directly programmable because it is decoupled from forwarding functions.
- Agile: Abstracting control from forwarding lets administrators dynamically adjust network-wide traffic flow to meet changing needs.
- Centrally managed: Network intelligence is centralized in software-based SDN controllers that maintain a global view of the network, which appears to applications and policy engines as a single, logical switch.
- Programmatically configured: SDN lets network managers configure, manage, secure, and optimize network resources very quickly via dynamic, automated SDN programs, which they can write themselves because the programs do not depend on proprietary software.
- Open standards-based and vendor-neutral: When implemented through open standards, SDN simplifies network design and operation because instructions are provided by SDN controllers instead of multiple, vendor-specific devices and protocols.
The need for a new network architecture
; Changing traffic patterns
; The "consumerization of IT"
; The rise of cloud services
; "Big data" means more bandwidth
Architectural components
The following list defines and explains the architectural components:; SDN Application
; SDN Controller
; SDN Datapath
; SDN Control to Data-Plane Interface
; SDN Northbound Interfaces
SDN Control Plane
; Centralized - Hierarchical - DistributedThe implementation of the SDN control plane can follow a centralized, hierarchical, or decentralized design. Initial SDN control plane proposals focused on a centralized solution, where a single control entity has a global view of the network. While this simplifies the implementation of the control logic, it has scalability limitations as the size and dynamics of the network increase. To overcome these limitations, several approaches have been proposed in the literature that fall into two categories, hierarchical and fully distributed approaches. In hierarchical solutions, distributed controllers operate on a partitioned network view, while decisions that require network-wide knowledge are taken by a logically centralized root controller. In distributed approaches, controllers operate on their local view or they may exchange synchronization messages to enhance their knowledge. Distributed solutions are more suitable for supporting adaptive SDN applications.
; Controller Placement
A key issue when designing a distributed SDN control plane is to decide on the number and placement of control entities. An important parameter to consider while doing so is the propagation delay between the controllers and the network devices, especially in the context of large networks. Other objectives that have been considered involve control path reliability, fault tolerance, and application requirements.
SDN flow forwarding (sdn)
; Proactive vs Reactive vs HybridApplications
SDMN
ing is an approach to the design of mobile networks where all protocol-specific features are implemented in software, maximizing the use of generic and commodity hardware and software in both the core network and radio access network. It is proposed as an extension of SDN paradigm to incorporate mobile network specific functionalities. Since 3GPP Rel.14, a Control User Plane Separation was introduced in the Mobile Core Network architectures with the PFCP protocol.SD-WAN
An SD-WAN is a Wide Area Network managed using the principles of software-defined networking. The main driver of SD-WAN is to lower WAN costs using more affordable and commercially available leased lines, as an alternative or partial replacement of more expensive MPLS lines. Control and management is administered separately from the hardware with central controllers allowing for easier configuration and administration.SD-LAN
An SD-LAN is a Local area network built around the principles of software-defined networking, though there are key differences in topology, network security, application visibility and control, management and quality of service. SD-LAN decouples control management, and data planes to enable a policy driven architecture for wired and wireless LANs. SD-LANs are characterized by their use of a cloud management system and wireless connectivity without the presence of a physical controller.Security using the SDN paradigm
SDN architecture may enable, facilitate or enhance network-related security applications due to the controller's central view of the network, and its capacity to reprogram the data plane at any time. While security of SDN architecture itself remains an open question that has already been studied a couple of times in the research community, the following paragraphs only focus on the security applications made possible or revisited using SDN.Several research works on SDN have already investigated security applications built upon the SDN controller, with different aims in mind. Distributed Denial of Service detection and mitigation, as well as botnet and worm propagation, are some concrete use-cases of such applications: basically, the idea consists in periodically collecting network statistics from the forwarding plane of the network in a standardized manner, and then apply classification algorithms on those statistics in order to detect any network anomalies. If an anomaly is detected, the application instructs the controller how to reprogram the data plane in order to mitigate it.
Another kind of security application leverages the SDN controller by implementing some moving target defense algorithms. MTD algorithms are typically used to make any attack on a given system or network more difficult than usual by periodically hiding or changing key properties of that system or network. In traditional networks, implementing MTD algorithms is not a trivial task since it is difficult to build a central authority able of determining - for each part of the system to be protected - which key properties are hid or changed. In an SDN network, such tasks become more straightforward thanks to the centrality of the controller. One application can for example periodically assign virtual IPs to hosts within the network, and the mapping virtual IP/real IP is then performed by the controller. Another application can simulate some fake opened/closed/filtered ports on random hosts in the network in order to add significant noise during reconnaissance phase performed by an attacker.
Additional value regarding security in SDN enabled networks can also be gained using FlowVisor and FlowChecker respectively. The former tries to use a single hardware forwarding plane sharing multiple separated logical networks. Following this approach the same hardware resources can be used for production and development purposes as well as separating monitoring, configuration and internet traffic, where each scenario can have its own logical topology which is called slice. In conjunction with this approach FlowChecker realizes the validation of new OpenFlow rules that are deployed by users using their own slice.
SDN controller applications are mostly deployed in large-scale scenarios, which requires comprehensive checks of possible programming errors. A system to do this called NICE was described in 2012. Introducing an overarching security architecture requires a comprehensive and protracted approach to SDN. Since it was introduced, designers are looking at possible ways to secure SDN that do not compromise scalability. One architecture called SN-SECA Security Architecture.
Group Data Delivery Using SDN
Distributed applications that run across datacenters usually replicate data for the purpose of synchronization, fault resiliency, load balancing and getting data closer to users. Also, many applications, such as Hadoop, replicate data within a datacenter across multiple racks to increase fault tolerance and make data recovery easier. All of these operations require data delivery from one machine or datacenter to multiple machines or datacenters. The process of reliably delivering data from one machine to multiple machines is referred to as Reliable Group Data Delivery.SDN switches can be used for RGDD via installation of rules that allow forwarding to multiple outgoing ports. For example, OpenFlow provides support for Group Tables since version 1.1 which makes this possible. Using SDN, a central controller can carefully and intelligently setup forwarding trees for RGDD. Such trees can be built while paying attention to network congestion/load status to improve performance. For example, MCTCP is a scheme for delivery to many nodes inside datacenters that relies on regular and structured topologies of datacenter networks while DCCast and QuickCast are approaches for fast and efficient data and content replication across datacenters over private WANs.