An OpenFlow Service Network Architecture

Abstract

The research community acknowledges that much of the existing Internet infrastructure, despite its demonstrated successes, remains somewhat brittle and unable to effectively accomodate increasingly specialized requirements. Though improvements have been introduced in the literature, fundamentally the Internet infrastructure remains resistant to change for a number of reasons. Recently, research and industry have pioneered promising trends such as cloud computing, Software Defined Networking (SDN), and overlay networks. We argue that many of the problems facing the Internet research community could be solved by a widearea, software-defined ’service overlay network’ architecture which, broadly speaking, synthesizes these three technologies. We present some thoughts and first steps toward formulating, implementing, and deploying this architecture, and discuss our view of its potential.