SDN application segregation, concurrency and order of execution

Abstract

One of the great attractions of Software Defined Networking (SDN) has been the promise of transforming the network by providing a degree of flexibility and automation that until now has never been available. Of interest however is that all of these exciting solutions are usually discussed in isolation and rarely do proponents allude to the fact that numerous applications can be deployed simultaneously. Unfortunately most SDN Controllers are incapable of managing multiple applications that require access to the same events notifications. In this paper, we introduce the concept of an Event Arbitration Manager (EAM), a modified event handler that provides mediation between applications on a single SDN controller. We show that the introduction of an event mediation layer between SDN applications would reduce conflicts between multiple applications on the same SDN controller and allows them to respond to controller events messages equally.