Traffic Engineering in Software Defined Networks

Software Defined Networking is a new networking paradigm that separates the network control plane from the packet forwarding plane and provides applications with an abstracted centralized view of the distributed network state. A logically centralized controller that has a global network view is responsible for all the control decisions and it communicates with the network-wide distributed forwarding elements via standardized interfaces. Google recently announced [5] that it is using a Software Defined Network (SDN) to interconnect its data centers due to the ease, efficiency and flexibility in performing traffic engineering functions. It expects the SDN architecture to result in better network capacity utilization and improved delay and loss performance. The contribution of this paper is on the effective use of SDNs for traffic engineering especially when SDNs are incrementally introduced into an existing network. In particular, we show how to leverage the centralized controller to get significant improvements in network utilization as well as to reduce packet losses and delays. We show that these improvements are possible even in cases where there is only a partial deployment of SDN capability in a network. We formulate the SDN controller's optimization problem for traffic engineering with partial deployment and develop fast Fully Polynomial Time Approximation Schemes (FPTAS) for solving these problems. We show, by both analysis and ns-2 simulations, the performance gains that are achievable using these algorithms even with an incrementally deployed SDN.