State of the Art and Recent Research Advances in Software Defined Networking

Table 7

Summarization of SDN application avenues.

Application Avenue	Brief description	Proposed initiatives
Wireless communications	Using a programmable wireless data plane offering flexible routing and traffic forwarding, SDN has the potential to fine tune mobile communication performance and introduce new applications and services.	(i) Introduction of a modular SDN framework in 5G cellular communication realm for horizontal service chaining and resource provisioning as well as analysing contextual analyses of user data to create intelligent traffic forwarding policies.; (ii) Simplifying management and traffic engineering in wireless mesh networks and deploying crowd-sharing models to create opportunities for network connectivity and bandwidth sharing.; (iii) Optimizing Wi-Fi radio channel assignment and furnishing communication between nodes to extend coverage in view of changing user load.; (iv) Increasing scalability and routing autonomy in IoT networking using SDN controllers to reduce management overhead and develop energy efficient control primitives.
Data centers and cloud environments	Operating at large scales such as data centers requires optimal traffic engineering and control which can be facilitated by the SDN framework to reduce latency, improve resource allocation, and reduce operational costs.	(i) Reducing network latency, improving control, and introducing intelligent resource provisioning in an automated and dynamic fashion in data centers using SDN based traffic orchestration.; (ii) Incorporation of SDN in cloud environments to increase service scalability and automated load balancing in multitenant shares.; (iii) Increasing energy efficiency in data center networking using the centralized control plane to place selected devices in low power modes during periods of underutilization.
Campus and high speed networks	Traffic patterns in enterprise campus and high speed backbone networks may show great deal of variation over time, requiring SDN based solutions for real-time programming of the network fabric according to prevailing traffic conditions.	(i) Using centralized SDN controller(s) to effectively monitor real-time traffic and accordingly load balance traffic over available links.; (ii) Integrating heterogeneous networks using packet based optical communication and circuit switching technologies to allow software defined optical networking (SDON).
Residential environments	Using the SDN framework to allow users and service providers greater visibility into residential and small office network usage for generating subscription models, managing bandwidth, capping data use, and introducing security features.	(i) Enhancing monitoring and management of resources using SDN enabled customer routers (data plane) from centralized service provider controller(s).; (ii) Implementing anomaly detection systems in programmable residential SDN environments for greater accuracy and scalability of use.