A literature review on Software-Defined Networking (SDN) research topics, challenges and solutions

Cloud computing data centers are becoming increasingly popular for the provisioning of computing resources. In the past, most of the research works focused on the effective use of the computational and storage resources by employing the Virtualization technology. Network automation and virtualization of data center LAN and WAN were not the primary focus. Recently, a key emerging trend in Cloud computing is that the core systems infrastructure, including compute resources, storage and networking, is increasingly becoming Software-Defined. In particular, instead of being limited by the physical infrastructure, applications and platforms will be able to specify their fine-grained needs, thus precisely defining the virtual environment in which they wish to run. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) plays an important role in paving the way for effectively virtualizing and managing the network resources in an on demand manner. Still, many research challenges remain: how to achieve network Quality of Service (QoS), optimal load balancing, scalability, and security. Hence, it is the main objective of this article to survey the current research work and describes the ongoing efforts to address these challenging issues.