Traffic Engineering in Software Defined Networks

Traffic Engineering in Software Defined Networks

Abstract—Software Defined Networking is a new networking paradigm that separates the network control plane from the packet forwarding plane and provides applications with an abstracted centralized view of the distributed network state. A logically centralized controller that has a global network view is responsible for all the control decisions and it communicates with the network-wide distributed forwarding elements via standardized interfaces. Google recently announced that it is using a Software Defined Network SDN < Final Year Projects 2016 > to interconnect its data centers due to the ease, efficiency and flexibility in performing traffic engineering functions. It expects the SDN architecture to result in better network capacity utilization and improved delay and loss performance. The contribution is on the effective use of SDNs for traffic engineering especially when SDNs are incrementally introduced into an existing network. In particular, we show how to leverage the centralized controller to get significant improvements in network utilization as well as to reduce packet losses and delays. We show that these improvements are possible even in cases where there is only a partial deployment of SDN capability in a network.