From software defined network to network defined for software

Abstract

Nowadays, Big Data applications exchange huge amounts of data, highly demanding network guarantees for bandwidth and low latency. However, network equipments did not provide a standard interface to control dynamically the resources. Software-Defined Network (SDN) has emerged to support network programmability, but it provides a programming model devoted to network operators. This paper presents the Network Overlay Framework (NoF), which enables networks to be defined based on application requirements. NoF provides a programming language which allows the application specialists to program the network. A compiler translates NoF programs into instructions according to the underlying network technology. To prove the effectiveness of NoF, programs were implemented to express bandwidth guarantees on Hadoop traffic and also to route Hadoop flows through overlay networks.