AgNOS: A Framework for Autonomous Control of Software-Defined Networks

Software-defined networks (SDN), an emergent paradigm for network management, define abstractions to represent network entities and logically centralize them in a network controller. We argue that SDN's abstraction is the most promising way to successfully create agent-based architectures to control and manage large-scale parts of the Internet. This article makes a strong case for these architectures by introducing a framework that integrates autonomous networks and SDN. First, we define autonomous SDN by complementary features of agent frameworks and those of SDN. Then we describe our agent approach, called AgNOS, which builds cooperative SDNs that extend their domains beyond enterprise networks. Finally, as a proof-of-concept, we present a case study on an important open issue of the Internet: mitigation of DDoS attacks when thousands of attackers perform malicious packet flooding and SDN domains must cooperate to cope with packet filtering at the source.