A Network Federation Scheme for Inter-Domain SDN Communications

Abstract

Recently, a variety of the integrated service platforms demand the innovative network technologies such as software-defined networking (SDN). However, it is problematic and complicated to provide interconnectivity and reachability between inter-domain SDNs. Thus, this paper proposes a scheme for the inter-SDN federation and communication based on the abstracted network information exchange and automated peer network configuration for the integrated network services. The proposed scheme is implemented and verified over the de-facto wide-area SDN infrastructure (KREONET-S) which is deployed on Korea Research Environment Open Network (KREONET), a representative national research network in Korea. The proposed method is implemented and experimented based on the distributed and layer-2 oriented network architecture by using the abstracted message exchanges between local SDN controllers in order to provide low message overheads and high federation scalability. Our research work contributes to more efficient inter-SDN communications by means of the data modeling abstraction of the local SDN network information and the simplified interactions between individual controllers by the automated configurations through the specific application interfaces. The proposed scheme also contributes to the development of the integrated service platforms which are demanded to provide IoT, Big Data, AI, and cloud services in the tightly coupled manner over the inter-SDN domains.