Towards the Semantic Web Based Northbound Interface for SDN Resource Management

The northbound interface of SDN is the functional interface exposed by the controller for upper layer applications to implement business logic. Recent studies on northbound interface focus on aspects such as portability, programmability, network virtualization, etc. The rich software features and open architecture offered by SDN have broadened the concept of network resources. Nevertheless, a systematic and abstract SDN resource management framework on a higher-level is yet to be thoroughly studied. This paper studies the Semantic Web based northbound interface for SDN resource management. It proposes a multi-level and fine-grained model of SDN using OWL based on which an SDN network resource management platform, SemSDN, is implemented by means of RDF, SPARQL, etc. SemSDN also implements a non-invasive QoS information collecting mechanism based on LLDP (i.e., the QoS over LLDP scheme) as well as the cost-based top-k shortest paths query extension for standard SPARQL (i.e., the KSPARQL extension). Basic experiment results exhibit SemSDN's applicabilities in network resource management in the context of SDN.