Development of an automatic managing system of wide-area distributed networks with defined network specification

Abstract

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) attracts attention as a technology to control and manage IP networks, which are inherently designed to be operated autonomously and decentralized, in a centralized manner. There have been proposed some SDN protocols like OpenFlow, but they have a restriction that existing legacy network devices which do not support SDN protocols are not controllable. In this paper, we allow an administrator to manage a wide-area distributed network composed of campus networks and data-center networks in which network devices do not have SDN features, in a single unitary policy, under an assumption that the backbone network supports SDN protocols like OpenFlow. We propose a network management system which generates necessary configuration based on defined network specification and sets the configuration to devices automatically and reactively, based on our Service-Defined Networking (SvDN) concept.