SDN-enabled application-aware networking for data center networks

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a networking paradigm that decouples the control plane of a network from its forwarding plane and offers programmability of the data plane devices to manage and control the ongoing traffic flows. This paper presents the control plane architecture of a data center network (DCN) and its operational services being developed for NEPHELEs optical network infrastructure. The heart of the proposed control plane overlay is an OpenDaylight SDN controller, which along-with its north and south-bound interfaces (NBI, SBI) bridges the gap between the cloud applications and the DC network configuration at the data plane, in order to automatically adjust the underlying network to the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements at the application level. An application based traffic shaping use case is presented as a proof of concept of application aware networking in SDN-enabled data center networks.

I. Introduction

NEPHELE is a multidisciplinary European research project that aims to develop a dynamic optical network infrastructure for highly scalable, disaggregated data centers. The scalability of a traditional ‘fat tree’ data center architecture is under question today due to its non- linear expansion to cope with the steady increase of traffic [1] in cloud and other content distribution applications etc. To tackle this problem, NEPHELE proposes a novel DCN architecture that aims to overcome the limitations of traditional DC design and drastically reduce the cost and power consumption of the cloud DCs.