An Integrated Framework for Software Defined Networking, Caching, and Computing

Although some excellent works have been done on networking, caching and computing, these three important areas have traditionally been addressed separately in the literature. In this article, we propose a novel framework that jointly considers networking, caching and computing techniques in order to improve end-to-end system performance. This integrated framework can enable dynamic orchestration of networking, caching and computing resources to meet the requirements of different applications. We define and develop the key components of this framework: the data plane, the control plane, and the management plane. The data plane consists of the devices that are responsible for networking, caching and computing operations. The control plane has a logically centralized controller to guide these operations. The management plane enables not only traditional applications, such as traffic engineering, but also new applications, such as content distribution and big data analytics. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed framework. In addition, we discuss a number of challenges of implementing the proposed framework of software defined networking, caching and computing.