SDN for End-Nodes: Scenario Analysis and Architectural Guidelines

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the challenges of deploying SDN for scattered, transient end-nodes like smartphones, proposes architectural guidelines, and validates a decentralized controller design through a proof-of-concept.

Contribution

It provides a detailed scenario analysis, identifies unique challenges, and offers a practical, decentralized SDN architecture for end-node control.

Findings

Identified unique challenges in SDN for end-nodes

Proposed a decentralized, distributed controller architecture

Validated the architecture with a proof-of-concept deployment

Abstract

The advent of SDN has brought a plethora of new architectures and controller designs for many use-cases and scenarios. Existing SDN deployments focus on campus, datacenter and WAN networks. However, little research efforts have been devoted to the scenario of effectively controlling a full deployment of end-nodes (e.g. smartphones) that are transient and scattered across the Internet. In this paper, we present a rigorous analysis of the challenges associated with an SDN architecture for end-nodes, show that such challenges are not found in existing SDN scenarios, and provide practical design guidelines to address them. Then, and following these guidelines we present a reference architecture based on a decentralized, distributed and symmetric controller with a connectionless pull-oriented southbound and an intent-driven northbound. Finally, we measure a proof-of-concept deployment to assess the validity of the analysis as well as the architecture.