A Comprehensive Tutorial on Software Defined Network

TLDR

The rapid growth of network usage creates challenges for administrators, and Software‑Defined Networking (SDN) offers a next‑generation solution that separates control from data planes to simplify management and address infrastructure ossification. The article aims to provide an overview of SDN and OpenFlow architecture, controller interactions, and the benefits of SDN. SDN achieves its goals by separating the control plane from the data plane, turning forwarding devices into simple switches while a centralized controller handles decision making.

Abstract

These days the usage of network is growing at a faster pace, at the same time a lot of challenges is facing by the network administrator, to tackle the frequent network access by the users. The network infrastructure is growing rapidly to meet the business need, but it requires re-policing and reconfiguration of the network. But managing the underlying infrastructure becomes more complicated to handle the unprecedented network demand. The Software Defined Network (SDN), is the next generation Internet technology, which not only solves the ossification of the Internet, but also creates innovations and simplifies the network management. The key idea behind SDN is separation of control plane from the data plane, as a result, devices in the data plane simple becomes the forwarding device and transfer all the decision-making activities in a centralized system called a controller. Among many, OpenFlow is the standard and most popular SDN protocol that interacts between controller and forwarding devices. In this article, we will give an overview of the basic architecture of SDN and OpenFlow, SDN-controller interaction and benefits of SDN.