Towards a decentralized and adaptive software-defined networking architecture

Abstract

Software-defined networking (SDN) is the rising technology in near future to build programmable networks as a way to simplify the evolution of networks. It is a new networking paradigm with the main aim is to decouple forwarding hardware from control decisions. However, existing SDN architectures are centralized and then cannot meet the requirements of both scalability and adaptability simultaneously. The way in which they have typically been constructed is often very inflexible due to the risk of bottlenecks. Issues are that SDN architectures must be able to scale to billions of nodes, able to adapt to dynamic conditions, must be highly available, secure and should require minimal human configuration and management. Therefore, new architectures are required and need to be highly flexible with self-organizing capabilities in order to cope with a dynamically changing environment. In this paper, a decentralized architecture is introduced. Design concepts are presented to highlight its operation modes.