Adaptive Resource Management and Control in Software Defined Networks

The heterogeneous nature of the applications, technologies and equipment that today's networks have to support has made the management of such infrastructures a complex task. The Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm has emerged as a promising solution to reduce this complexity through the creation of a unified control plane independent of specific vendor equipment. However, designing a SDN-based solution for network resource management raises several challenges as it should exhibit flexibility, scalability and adaptability. In this paper, we present a new SDN-based management and control framework for fixed backbone networks, which provides support for both static and dynamic resource management applications. The framework consists of three layers which interact with each other through a set of interfaces. We develop a placement algorithm to determine the allocation of managers and controllers in the proposed distributed management and control layer. We then show how this layer can satisfy the requirements of two specific applications for adaptive load-balancing and energy management purposes.