Towards Software Defined Cognitive Networking

Cognitive networking has the potential to enable autonomic network management by empowering the network components to automatically adjust to the changing network environment. However, strict isolation between the layers of the currently used communication model and static nature of networking equipment have delimited the deployment of cognitive networks. Software Defined Networking (SDN) separates the network architecture from its infrastructure to enable programmatic control of networking equipment from logically centralized servers. By adopting the principles of SDN, we propose software defined cognitive networking (SDCoN) to integrate the dynamism of cognitive networking and programmatic control of SDN. In this paper, we present the SDCoN framework and initial results from the SDCoN testbed that reveal the success of the proposed SDN-based cognitive networking architecture.