Hybrid SDN Evolution: A Comprehensive Survey of the State-of-the-Art

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive survey of Hybrid SDN, exploring its evolution, benefits, challenges, and research trends to understand its role as a practical alternative to traditional networking.

Contribution

It offers an extensive overview of Hybrid SDN, highlighting recent developments, research challenges, and future directions in the field.

Findings

Hybrid SDN is increasingly adopted by enterprises.

Research on Hybrid SDN has grown significantly in recent years.

Hybrid SDN offers a practical compromise between traditional and fully software-defined networks.

Abstract

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an evolutionary networking paradigm which has been adopted by large network and cloud providers, among which are Tech Giants. However, embracing a new and futuristic paradigm as an alternative to well-established and mature legacy networking paradigm requires a lot of time along with considerable financial resources and technical expertise. Consequently, many enterprises can not afford it. A compromise solution then is a hybrid networking environment (a.k.a. Hybrid SDN (hSDN)) in which SDN functionalities are leveraged while existing traditional network infrastructures are acknowledged. Recently, hSDN has been seen as a viable networking solution for a diverse range of businesses and organizations. Accordingly, the body of literature on hSDN research has improved remarkably. On this account, we present this paper as a comprehensive state-of-the-art survey which expands upon hSDN from many different perspectives.