Vendor-Independent Software-Defined Networking

Abstract

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging trend in networking that offers several advantages such as smoother network management over traditional networks. By decoupling the control and data planes from network elements, a huge amount of new opportunities arise, especially in network virtualization. In cloud datacenters, where virtualization plays a fundamental role, SDN presents itself as the perfect candidate to ease infrastructure management and to ensure correct operation. Even if the original SDN ideology advocates openness of source and interfaces, multiple networking vendors offer their proprietary solutions. In this work, an open-source SDN solution, named Tungsten Fabric, is evaluated in a virtualized datacenter and several SDN-related industry use-cases are examined. The main goal of this work is to determine whether Tungsten Fabric can deliver the same set of use-cases as proprietary solutions.