Enterprise Integration Patterns in SDN: A Reliable, Fault-Tolerant Communication Framework

In today's era, large data centers are drawn toward the two popular technologies, i.e., enterprise integration patterns (EIP) and software defined networking (SDN). The former is the combination of design patterns which integrates the new and existing business applications in an enterprise environment, whereas the latter is a rapidly evolving networking paradigm that has reshaped the large enterprise network management by introducing the programmable planes and centralized control. The promising features of EIP, i.e., asynchronous communication, reliability and that of SDN, namely, robustness, network programmability, agility, and global visibility can be merged in order to cope with growing network demands and security. In this article, we propose a communication framework that incorporates both EIP and SDN in an enterprise environment. The architecture of the propose communication framework consists of adaptive virtual local area network (VLAN) module to install and delete VLANs reactively using EIP. Furthermore, to enable communication between applications from different networks in an enterprise environment, this framework also contains a packet forwarding module where hosts IP addresses are concealed from each other. In the end, we demonstrate through simulations that how the proposed integrated design can be helpful in improving the security, efficiency, and reliability aspects of the enterprise network. As proof of concept, we also discuss the deployment of our proposed framework in IoT-based Smart Cities, which is the extension of EIP on a large scale.