SDN-AAA: Towards the standard management of AAA infrastructures

Abstract

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a widely adopted technology that enables agile and flexible management of networks and services. This paradigm is a strong candidate for addressing the dynamic and secure management of large and complex Authentication, Authorization and Accounting (AAA) infrastructures. In those infrastructures, multiple nodes must securely exchange information to interconnect different realms, and the manual configuration of these nodes represents a significant point of failure and a challenge for administrators. This paper presents a novel SDN-based framework, named SDN-AAA, that follows a data model-driven approach using the YANG standard. This framework enables the dynamic management of routing and security configurations in AAA scenarios. Additionally, empirical results demonstrate that the proposed framework can handle increasing numbers of nodes without significant performance degradation in mesh and star topologies, with configuration and routing times that linearly or exponentially scale depending on the topology used. This validates the feasibility of the solution in real-world scenarios.