Software-Defined Networking for Data Centre Network Management: A Survey

TL;DR

This survey reviews how Software-Defined Networking (SDN) enables dynamic, programmable management of data centre networks to handle increasing traffic and changing tenant requirements effectively.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of SDN research focused on data centre network management and operation, highlighting recent advances and challenges.

Findings

SDN improves flexibility and scalability of data centre networks.

Research has focused on traffic management, fault tolerance, and resource allocation.

SDN adoption enhances network agility and reduces operational costs.

Abstract

Data centres are growing in numbers and size, and their networks expanding to carry larger amounts of traffic. The traffic profile is constantly varying, particularly in cloud data centres where tenants arrive, leave, and may change their resource requirements in between, and so the network configuration must change at a commensurate rate. Software-Defined Networking - programmatic control of network configuration - has been critical to meeting the demands of modern data centre network management, and has been the subject of intense focus by the research community, working in conjunction with industry. In this survey, we review Software-Defined Networking research targeting the management and operation of data centre networks.