A YANG model for a vertical SDN management plane

Specifying a Management Plane for the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) architecture is essential for monitoring, configuring and handling computer networks. Diverse solutions have proposed it but they share some shortcomings: incomplete representations of SDN elements, few human readable languages for managing networks, no communication management aimed at Internet Engineering and absence of supporting communication between Autonomous Systems. In this paper, we introduce a protocol-agnostic Data Model based on YANG that specifies a vertical SDN management Plane, handles technology heterogeneity and supports inter-domain communication. To test our Data Model, we evaluate a prototype in an SDN configuration scenario that includes devices supporting diverse technologies. The obtained results provide directions that corroborate the efficiency of our approach in terms of time-response and network traffic.