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| Area of concentration | Brief description | Research initiatives |
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| Application performance | Improving the performance of individual network applications and services in the SDN framework using novel optimization techniques in wired, wireless, and heterogeneous settings. | (i) Increasing SDN application awareness and optimizing time-critical application services using flow metering.
(ii) Development of SDN monitoring tools for evaluating performance gains in heterogeneous network environments.
(iii) Embedding network services, such as authentication, firewalls, proxies, and so forth, in the data plane fabric.
(iv) Information-centric approaches exploiting location-based data caching. |
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| Controller scalability and placement | Controller placement in large SDN environments offers a complexity optimization problem affecting latency, capacity, and fault tolerance. The design of the control plane remains a multifaceted topic of several research studies. | (i) Reducing latency by solving optimal controller placement problem (NP-hard).
(ii) Solutions minimizing controller workload with respect to controller placement.
(iii) Distributed control architectures offering greater reliability using heuristic and greedy algorithms to refactor larger network into smaller subnetworks.
(iv) Combinatorial approaches optimizing multiple network performance metrics in relation to controller placement, providing a trade-off between performance gains and operational requirements. |
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| Switch and controller design | Studies aimed at improving northbound API standardization among multiple application platforms, level of control delegation appropriate for data plane elements, and optimal hardware architectures. | (i) Standardization of the northbound API, involving studies in designing a vendor neutral policy abstraction language offering vertical and horizontal integration with existing network fabric/services.
(ii) Greater level of control delegation to network switches aimed at reducing controller overhead and increasing fail-safe redundancy.
(iii) New architectures for controller and switch design. |
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| Security | SDN due to centralized network control creates potential security challenges directed at control plane (traffic) and data plane elements including network appliances and middle boxes. | (i) Designing SDN security reference models and methods focusing on securing network entities to avoid disruption and security compromises.
(ii) Control channel and application-controller traffic monitoring and anomaly detection in specific avenues for example, clouds.
(iii) Network/state information storage and retrieval for postevent and forensic examination. |
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| Interconnecting SDN Domains | Autonomous systems managed by independent SDN controllers (or operators) requireing timely intercontroller information exchange and underlying mechanisms to support network orchestration as well as application delivery between disparate SDN domains. | (i) Legacy routing protocols such as BGP and OSPF implemented with extensions to support interdomain SDN controller communication.
(ii) SDN-specific approaches defining new network orchestration applications and information exchange architectures. |
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