Flexnets: Evaluating flexibility in softwarized communication networks

All areas of our information society depend on communication networks as a basic infrastructure. Emerging applications raise the need for dynamic changes of the required networking resources, for example, to react to social events or to shifts of demands over time. Providing the required flexibility to react to those changes and being cost efficient at the same time has recently become a huge challenge in research. With Software Defined Networking (SDN), Network Virtualization and Network Function Virtualization, three concepts for network softwareization have emerged in the networking research, which claim to increase flexibility in networking. However, a deeper understanding of the flexibility vs. cost trade-off is missing so far in networking research. This talk focuses on the challenges of flexible networking, proposes a definition for a flexibility measure, which allows to quantitatively compare different network designs, and will highlight selected solution concepts. Presented research topics include the placement of network functions and the dynamic placement of controllers as well as SDN network virtualization based on a new network hypervisor concept.