Towards Semantic Network Models via Graph Databases for SDN Applications

At the core of any network control and management system is the representation and maintenance of network topology information. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) treats topology abstractions as one of the cornerstones towards rethinking network architectures and the way they are operated. Recently, motivated by the scalability and performance needs of cloud applications, Graph Databases are being adopted as appealing alternatives to traditional relational models when data is highly interconnected and extensible schemas are called for. In addition, the use of metadata to describe how data is interconnected by means of Web Semantic standards is increasingly gaining ground. At the crossroads of these trends, this paper presents an approach to augment SDN network state with a semantic model leveraging graph database technologies. In particular, our proposal imports the Network Mark up Language (NML) model into a scalable graph database (Neo4j). For validation purposes, we evaluate our proof of concept implementation against a representative set of SDN application primitives.