A heterogeneous software defined networking architecture for the tactical edge

Traffic demand in terms of total traffic volume and bit rate of mobile users is expected to increase exponentially over the coming years. As a result, current cellular networks are rapidly reaching their capacity limitations. Rescaling existing networks and protocols will not solve the problem due to a number of reasons. Firstly, the cost of upgrading backhaul networks is very high. Secondly, the bottleneck is moving from the Radio Access Network (RAN) to the core network. Finally, difficulty of mobility management and operational cost are becoming very high. Therefore, a recent direction in research has been to deploy high dense heterogeneous networks called DenseNets. In this paper, a novel three-tiered Software Defined Networking (SDN) architecture is proposed to support heterogeneous DenseNets. SDN architecture with the proposed 3-tiers, identified as physical, control and management layers, is capable of tackling the aforementioned problems, as well as mitigating network bottlenecks, latency and interference.

Exploring interoperability assessment for Future Internet Architectures roll out

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) architecture was developed to address the shortcomings of traditional network architectures. It allows system administrators to easily manage and configure the network by separating and abstracting the control plane from the data plane. All the knowledge and intelligence of SDN is concentrated in a software entity called the SDN controller, making the network programmable. However, a large-scale SDN architecture, particularly in the IoT domain, requires the implementation of a physically distributed control mechanism. Such a mechanism, based on the East/West interface raises many challenges in terms of scalability, reliability, security, consistency, and traceability. The development of the Blockchain allows addressing some of these challenges. In this paper, we present a design using Blockchain technology to improve SDNs in terms of trackability and discuss the adaptations required for large-scale deployment. Experimental results clearly show that the use of a proof-of-authority consensus algorithm in combination with a Merkle tree approach reduces the impact in terms of latency as well as in terms of Gas consumption.

The Internet has reached a breaking point, enabling ubiquitous accessibility to all digital demands. Though people have accelerated their use of overall digital demands due to the convenience of the Internet, where nearly everything is connected and accessible, it is becoming increasingly difficult to manage and modify networks. It is always a challenge to meet the emerging needs of network industry. SDN framework was proposed to overcome traditional network architecture (TNA) restrictions in order to cope with contemporary network management in terms of flexibility, agility, responding to faults, and dynamic changes. SDN assists network operators by uncoupling the control plane from its underlying ternary content-addressable memory (TCAM) hardware often called as forwarding plane by allowing the networks to programme as per the anticipated network functionality. Now, switching from traditional to software-defined networking styles, it is worth to check the robustness of the open flow (south bound interface)-based controller platform and the capability of its fault tolerance attribute to approach the successful SDN implementation. The performance of SDN open flow controllers plays a vital role in SDN implementation, which is meant for the separation between control and data plane to leverage the life of network industry. This paper comprehensively surveys the contrast between traditional network architecture (TNA) and software-defined network architecture. This research work discusses about the best feasible SDN implementation, as well as the selection of a useful controller platform for overcoming traditional network constraints and the performance assessment criteria for SDN open flow controllers. Further, the survey is continued with possible literature or work done by various researchers on performance analysis and evaluation of open flow-based SDN controllers as well as in a group of two or more controllers with respect to multifarious network condition, network criteria/parameter/metric, scaling of network load resources with most important varying network topology design. Ultimately, it strives to point ongoing research omission with respect to controller’s performance bottleneck benchmark suggesting optimized solution when it is well experimented.KeywordsTraditional network architecture (TNA)Software-defined networking (SDN)SDN open flow controllersOpen flow protocolPerformance evaluation/analysis

In a distributed Software Defined Networking (SDN) architecture, the Quality of Service (QoS) experienced by a traffic flow through an SDN switch is primarily dependant on the SDN controller to which that switch is mapped. We propose a new controller-quality metric known as the Quality of Controller (QoC) which is defined based on the controller's reliability and response time. We model the controller reliability based on Bayesian inference while its response time is modelled as a linear approximation of the M/M/1 queue. We develop a QoC-aware approach for solving (i) the switch-controller mapping problem and, (ii) control traffic distribution among the mapped controllers. Each switch is mapped to multiple controllers to enable resilience with the switch-controller mapping and control traffic distribution based on the QoC metric which is the combined cost of controller reliability and response time. We first develop an optimization programming formulation that maximizes the minimum QoC among the set of controllers to solve the above problem. Since the optimization problem is computationally prohibitive for large networks, we develop a heuristic algorithm - Qoc-Aware switch-coNTroller Mapping (QuANTuM) - that solves the problem of switch-controller mapping and control traffic distribution in two stages such that the minimum of the controller QoC is maximized. Through simulations, we show that the heuristic results are within 18% of the optimum while achieving a fair control traffic distribution with a QoC min-max ratio of up to 95%.

Purpose The purpose of the study concludes detecting address resolution protocol (ARP) Spoofing attack in software-defined network (SDN) architecture meanwhile using different machine learning models to evaluate their effectiveness. Design/methodology/approach This research originates from building a SDN topology and researching into its changes under ARP Spoofing attack. Based on that, the authors propose four features which show obvious abnormalities in network under attack stage. The data collected from SDN controller is used to build a data set, which is then put into different machine learning models, which are: Artificial Neuron network (ANN), Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), CNN-LSTM and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU). Findings After applying this proposal in simulation and experimental environments, they achieve impressive performance metrics. In simulation environment, the GRU model stands out with the highest accuracy of 98.94%. In real environments, the CNN-LSTM model leads with a recall of 98.38% and an F1-Score of 98.57%, while the LSTM model has the highest precision (98.8%). The GRU model also performs strongly in real scenarios with a high accuracy of 97.65%. ANN, despite its reliability, struggles with lower recall and F1-Score across both environments. Originality/value This analysis emphasizes the importance of the proposed features when applied to different models and their high potential to conduct in practical environment.

The software-defined network (SDNs) architecture can easily be attacked by a malicious user in order to prevent an acceptable level of service. Therefore, SDN security is a hot research topic to improve the SDN architecture and to protect the service level of the SDN components. In this letter, the INSPECTOR is a hardware device added to the SDN architecture to protect a compromised controller from a packet injection attack by verifying the authentication of Packet-In Messages accessing network resources. With simulations, we show that the INSPECTOR device efficiently stops the attack and enhances the controller performance under malicious attack.

Software-defined networking (SDN) is a new networking architecture with a centralized control mechanism. SDN has proven to be successful in improving not only the network performance, but also security. However, centralized control in the SDN architecture is associated with new security vulnerabilities. In particular, user-datagram-protocol (UDP) flooding attacks can be easily launched and cause serious packet-transmission delays, controller-performance loss, and even network shutdown. In response to applications in the Internet of Things (IoT) field, this study considers UDP flooding attacks in SDN and proposes two lightweight countermeasures. The first method sometimes sacrifices address-resolution-protocol (ARP) requests to achieve a high level of security. In the second method, although packets must sometimes be sacrificed when undergoing an attack before starting to defend, the detection of the network state can prevent normal packets from being sacrificed. When blocking a network attack, attacks from the affected port are directly blocked without affecting normal ports. The performance and security of the proposed methods were confirmed by means of extensive experiments. Compared with the situation where no defense is implemented, or similar defense methods are implemented, after simulating a UDP flooding attack, our proposed method performed better in terms of the available bandwidth, central-processing-unit (CPU) consumption, and network delay time.

The Software Defined Networks (SDN) architecture deploys the programmable network by decoupling the data plane and control plane from the existing network architectures. Control activities are put into a software called controller. This new architecture, utilizes programmable controllers, enhances the intelligence of the networks’ operations and enables network engineers to serve their business requirements more efficiently. One of issues in SDN is, estimating the required number of controllers needed and placing it in optimal locations. Many works have been proposed to place controllers in its optimal locations. In most of the works, the controller placement was based on some mathematical formulations, or by heuristic approach and number of controller required was given as an input parameter. In this work, a Traffic Engineering (TE) based controller deployment is proposed. For placing controllers K-Medoid algorithm was used and ANN model was created for analysing and predicting the traffic.

Named Data Networking is a novel network architecture for the future internet in which data is named rather than addressed. This enables routers to forward data more efficiently based on its name, outperforming IP‐based routing. Another networking architecture that divides the control plane and the data plane is software‐defined networking (SDN). In an SDN network, the control plane decides on routing while the data plane forwards data packets. This separation increases routing flexibility and scalability. Numerous techniques to improve routing can be achieved with NDN and SDN integration. This paper provides an in‐depth examination of routing approaches in NDN based on SDN, emphasizing design principles, algorithms, and performance measures. We begin by summarizing the NDN architecture and delving into its essential components. We next go into the core routing ideas in NDN and categorize and study several routing solutions based on Software Defined Networks. Finally, we highlight the need for scalable, effective, and secure routing systems that may satisfy the expanding requirements of the contemporary internet. We also suggest open research topics in NDN routing based on SDN. This review provides an extensive overview of current centralized routing approaches in NDN, including their limitations and future possibilities.

Through network programmability, we may simplify network management and bring innovation, cloud computing introduced some of its network concepts. One of the most prominent cloud models for minimizing maintenance obligations and simplifying network infrastructure administration is the SDN (Software Defined Network) architecture. SDN stands out because it provides separation of the control plane and programmability for developing network applications. As a result, SDN is expected to enable more efficient configuration, higher performance, and increased flexibility to support new network architectures. This article is aimed to demonstrates the importance of the SDN and the major role it plays in the organization and how SDNs can be profitable to many organizations that remain in the archaic or a traditional cloud environment and how SDN can restructure the cloud architecture with more security enhancement and also to investigate SDN related issues and challenges to provide insight into the obstacles that this revolutionary network paradigm will face in the future, from both a protocol and architecture standpoint. In this study, systematic literature was conducted and descriptive was used to analyze data. When it comes to SDN, the following challenges and issues stand out: All of these phrases are used to characterize the properties of a system: scalability, high availability, reliability, elasticity, security, performance, resilience, and dependability.

We present a control plane architecture to enable software-addressable optical acceleration from the application layer. The architecture is experimentally examined on a cluster-computing test-bed by enabling physical layer optical multicasting on-demand for the application layer to achieve non-blocking performance.

Nowadays, more and more electric power services are carried on the power information communication network (PICN) including power grid production and scheduling, communication, and environment sensing, in the form of data, voice and video. To improve the resource utilization efficiency, it is necessary to carry out traffic prediction approach in PICN. However, the accessing businesses have diversified characteristics, which are reflected to different types of traffic flow in PICN. Moreover, the traditional PICN is a distributed network and cannot be controlled flexibly, which leads to the poor accuracy of traffic prediction algorithm. To address these problems, we combine the Software Defined Networking (SDN) architecture and Radial Basis Function neural network (RBFNN) for traffic intelligent prediction in PICN. The SDN controller can acquire global knowledge of PICN in each time slot to guide the data sampling process. Further, the complex nonlinear relationships of large-scale network traffics are analyzed by RBFNN model to realize high-precision traffic identification. The proposed scheme is evaluated based on by POX and Mininet platforms. Simulation results show that the proposed SDN-based intelligent prediction scheme can accurately forecast the change trend of each traffic flow and has better performance and lower prediction error than current schemes.

A decentralized power distribution network consisting of smart microgrids introduces opportunities to trade with energy called transactive energy. However, research studies in the existing literature suggest that several standardized information models for TE do not meet the network architecture’s reliability, flexibility, and security requirements. This limitation is mainly due to the static nature of traditional IP infrastructure. To achieve these requirements in the network architecture, this study investigates the optimized application of software-defined network architecture for transactive energy in smart microgrid systems. Through literature research, unique design approaches in an SDN architecture are identified that improve the reliability, flexibility, and security of the SDN architecture. These design approaches include a decentralized controller network layout, redundant link configuration, a mesh network topology, and data encryption. The proposed solution uniquely combines these design approaches into a single optimized SDN solution for TESMS. To validate the improvements of the findings from the literature research, each design approach is simulated in this study using Mininet SDN emulator and AnyLogic system simulation software. The proposed solution is then applied to a use-case scenario that shows the improvements required for TESMS. The use-case scenario shows significant improvement in the data path uptime. An improvement of 0.27% is achieved, which equates to a 2 h per month increase in the data path uptime. The results of the simulation show that the proposed SDN architecture improves the reliability and flexibility of a traditional SDN network. Furthermore, enabling encryption between the nodes improves the security of the SDN architecture.

Software‐defined networking (SDN) is a relatively new approach in network management that proposes to separate the network control (Control plane) and the forwarding process (Data plane) to optimize the network infrastructure and improve network performance, controllability, manageability and flexibility. However, like every technology, SDN has brought its own new challenges in terms of security and scalability which are very important aspects that should be considered to design and build a resilient architecture in order to meet carrier grade network requirements. In this paper, we propose a secure SDN architecture with IEEE 802.1X port‐based authentication where we also consider the controller's scalability issue by devolving the access control capability to the data plane. In this way, we reduce the high demand and the workload on the SDN controller. Our proposed model presents a novel SDN network architecture and logical network segmentation which provides an optimal and secure network access with low latency. We have implemented and tested our architecture to show its performance (authentication delays). Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.