Traffic Engineering in Software Defined Networks: A Survey

Abstract

An important technique to optimize a network and improve network robustness is traffic engineering. As traffic demand increases, traffic engineering can reduce service degradation and failure in the network. To allow a network to adapt to changes in the traffic pattern, the research community proposed several traffic engineering techniques for the traditional networking architecture. However, the traditional network architecture is difficult to manage. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a new networking model, which decouples the control plane and data plane of the networking devices. It promises to simplify network management, introduces network programmability, and provides a global view of network state. To exploit the potential of SDN, new traffic engineering methods are required. This paper surveys the state of the art in traffic engineering techniques with an emphasis on traffic engineering for SDN. It focuses on some of the traffic engineering methods for the traditional network architecture and the lessons that can be learned from them for better traffic engineering methods for SDN-based networks. This paper also explores the research challenges and future directions for SDN traffic engineering solutions.