Shortening the Response Time in Software-Defined Networking: A Sensitivity Analysis Approach

Today’s IP networks are complex and hard to manage. This is mainly due to vertical integration of control plane and data plane inside the network devices in traditional IP networks. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a new networking paradigm that is promoted to resolve traditional networking issues. In SDN-enabled networks, a central controller dictates the behaviour of forwarding devices aiming to satisfy the requirements of network applications such as Quality of Service (QoS) related network applications e.g. packet loss rate, latency and throughput. The central controller accomplishes that by translating high-level policies into low-level commands and installing them on forwarding devices. This can be a very prolonged and time consuming process particularly, when the central controller aims to satisfy the requirements of multiple network applications at the same time. This paper provides a mathematical analysis on the response time offered by existing SDN approach followed by proposing an approach to decrease the response time.