Ángel Leonardo Valdivieso Caraguay

SDN: Evolution and Opportunities in the Development IoT Applications

The exponential growth of devices connected to the network has resulted in the development of new IoT applications and on-line services. However, these advances are limited by the rigidity of the current network infrastructure, in which the administrator has to implement high-level network policies adapting and configuring protocols manually and usually through a command line interface (CLI). At this point, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) appears as a viable alternative network architecture that allows for programming the network and opening the possibility of creating new services andmore efficient applications to cover the actual requirements. In this paper, we describe this new technology and analyze its opportunities in the development of IoT applications. Similarly, we present the first applications and projects based on this technology. Finally, we discuss the issues and challenges in its implementation.The exponential growth of devices connected to the network has resulted in the development of new IoT applications and on-line services. However, these advances are limited by the rigidity of the current network infrastructure, in which the administrator has to implement high-level network policies adapting and configuring protocols manually and usually through a command line interface (CLI). At this point, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) appears as a viable alternative network architecture that allows for programming the network and opening the possibility of creating new services and more efficient applications to cover the actual requirements. In this paper, we describe this new technology and analyze its opportunities in the development of IoT applications. Similarly, we present the first applications and projects based on this technology. Finally, we discuss the issues and challenges in its implementation.

Evolution and Challenges of Software Defined Networking

Software Defined Networking (SDN) proposes the separation of the control plane from the data plane in network nodes. Furthermore, Openflow architecture through a centralized control of the packet forwarding engines enables the network administrators to literally program the network behavior. The research and results of experiments show clear advantages over traditional network architectures. However, there are open questions to be solved in order to integrate SDN infrastructure and applications in production networks. This paper presents an analysis of the evolution of SDN in recent years. Additionally, this piece of work also describes some interesting SDN/Openflow research initiatives and applications. Finally, there is a disscussion on the main challenges of this new technology.

Trends on virtualisation with software defined networking and network function virtualisation

Software defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualisation (NFV) have become hot topics in recent years. On one hand, SDN decouples the control plane from the data plane allowing the rapid innovation and the introduction of new services in an easy way. On the other hand, currently proprietary appliances such as load balancers and firewalls are implemented in hardware, NFV aims to change these network functions to an open software environment using virtualisation and cloud technologies. This means a reduction of spends in the provisioning and management of telecom services. SDN and NFV are two different concepts but these can coexist and help each other. In this study, the authors present a survey of SDN and NFV focusing in virtualisation projects and the use cases where a synergy between these technologies is possible. This study includes the basic concepts of network virtualisation, NFV and SDN, current research and the relation between both technologies.

Key Technologies in the Context of Future Networks: Operational and Management Requirements

The concept of Future Networks is based on the premise that current infrastructures require enhanced control, service customization, self-organization and self-management capabilities to meet the new needs in a connected society, especially of mobile users. In order to provide a high-performance mobile system, three main fields must be improved: radio, network, and operation and management. In particular, operation and management capabilities are intended to enable business agility and operational sustainability, where the addition of new services does not imply an excessive increase in capital or operational expenditures. In this context, a set of key-enabled technologies have emerged in order to aid in this field. Concepts such as Software Defined Network (SDN), Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Self-Organized Networks (SON) are pushing traditional systems towards the next 5G network generation.This paper presents an overview of the current status of these promising technologies and ongoing works to fulfill the operational and management requirements of mobile infrastructures. This work also details the use cases and the challenges, taking into account not only SDN, NFV, cloud computing and SON but also other paradigms.

Towards Incidence Management in 5G Based on Situational Awareness

The fifth generation mobile network, or 5G, moves towards bringing solutions to deploying faster networks, with hundreds of thousands of simultaneous connections and massive data transfer. For this purpose, several emerging technologies are implemented, resulting in virtualization and self-organization of most of their components, which raises important challenges related to safety. In order to contribute to their resolution, this paper proposes a novel architecture for incident management on 5G. The approach combines the conventional risk management schemes with the Endsley Situational Awareness model, thus improving effectiveness in different aspects, among them the ability to adapt to complex and dynamical monitoring environments, and countermeasure tracking or the role of context when decision-making. The proposal takes into account all layers for information processing in 5G mobile networks, ranging from infrastructure to the actuators responsible for deploying corrective measures.

Monitoring and Discovery for Self-Organized Network Management in Virtualized and Software Defined Networks

This paper presents the Monitoring and Discovery Framework of the Self-Organized Network Management in Virtualized and Software Defined Networks SELFNET project. This design takes into account the scalability and flexibility requirements needed by 5G infrastructures. In this context, the present framework focuses on gathering and storing the information (low-level metrics) related to physical and virtual devices, cloud environments, flow metrics, SDN traffic and sensors. Similarly, it provides the monitoring data as a generic information source in order to allow the correlation and aggregation tasks. Our design enables the collection and storing of information provided by all the underlying SELFNET sublayers, including the dynamically onboarded and instantiated SDN/NFV Apps, also known as SELFNET sensors.

Framework for optimized multimedia routing over software defined networks

The increase of data traffic moving in the Internet is particularly concentrated in multimedia content. However, the rigidity of the typical Internet architecture based on best-effort oriented IP network has limited the development of innovative network services. The new post-PC multimedia services require networks with high levels of flexibility and customization in order to provide efficient security, mobility, availability and QoS. In this context, software defined networking (SDN) is a novel paradigm that decouples the data and control plane in network devices and opens the programming capabilities of the network behavior. SDN opens the possibility to customize the network behavior in function of the different users requirements.In this paper, we describe the SDN architecture and analyze the opportunities to provide new multimedia services. Moreover, a SDN framework is also presented to provide QoS for different multimedia services. This framework uses OpenFlow, Network Virtualization and establishes functional boxes and interfaces to test different routing algorithms. Then, the modules of Network Performance and QoS Routing Algorithm are implemented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework. The experiments with video streaming information show a quality optimization (PSNR, SSIM, MOS) in comparison with the best effort engine. Finally, the challenges of SDN and the future lines of work are presented.

An optimisation framework for monitoring of SDN/OpenFlow networks

The centralised control of the network and the separation of data and control planes proposed by software defined networking (SDN) have changed the rigid, static, and complex nature of the networks. The decisions taken by the control plane depends on the accuracy of the monitored information on network performance and detection of network events (link failure, delay, loss, network overhead). However, the monitoring information is typically provided by external network monitoring solutions which require the installation of specialised (and costly) equipment. This work proposes an efficient SDN monitoring framework using the OpenFlow protocol. Moreover, the pluggable architecture enables the creation, updating and customisation of high level metrics as well as the orchestrator balancing the monitoring tasks and offering an adaptive method of polling information requests. The implementation of network performance metrics and the results of experiments using video streaming traffic demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework.