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Title: Can Host-Based SDNs Rival the Traffic Engineering Abilities of Switch-Based SDNs?
The software-defined networking (SDN) paradigm offers significant flexibility for network operators. However, the SDN community has focused on switch-based implementations, which pose several challenges. First, some may require significant hardware costs to upgrade a network. Further, fine-grained flow control in a switch-based SDN results in well-known, fundamental scalability limitations. These challenges may limit the reach of SDN technologies. In this work, we explore the extent to which host-based SDN agents can achieve feature parity with switch-based SDNs. Prior work has shown the potential of host-based SDNs for security and access control. Our study finds that with appropriate preparation, a host-based agent offers the same capabilities of switch-based SDNs in the remaining key area of traffic engineering, even in a legacy managed-switch network. We find the approach offers comparable performance to switch-based SDNs while eliminating the flow table scalability and cost concerns of switch-based SDN deployments.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1422180
NSF-PAR ID:
10177005
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
IEEE Network of the Future (NoF)
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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