A Brief Study of Software Defined Networking for Cloud Computing

The latest revolution in the field of networking is software defined networking (SDN). It is the key to set up virtual networks using current hardware infrastructure and program it to define a flexible network in a short time and with a low cost. The control and data planes are decoupled in the SDN architecture. Also, network management is logically centralized, and the underlying system in network infrastructure is abstracted from the applications. To communicate remotely with network plane elements, SDN needs to be associated with a specific protocol. There are some solutions available that can be exploited by SDN. OpenFlow is one of the most common techniques to be associated with SDN. It helps researchers run experiments on various types of switches uniformly with high port density and at line rate, whilst there is no need to know the internal design of vendors' switches. We first illustrate SDN in this article, and then briefly explain OpenFlow and its specifications.