Software Defined Networking Information 2022

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Software defined networking
Discussion of what SDN is really all about
Software-defined networking refers to an architecture that aims to make flexible and agile networks. Its
primary goal is to improve network management by enabling service offers and enterprises to quickly
respond to the ever varying business requirements.
This technique is a move away from the legacy network architecture where individual network devices
used to make decisions concerning traffic on the basis of the configurations.
The Software-defined network architecture consists of three layers; control layer, infrastructure layer,
and application layer.
The application consists of the network typical applications and functions which business operations use
control the network. The application systems include firewalls, load balancing and detection systems.
The legacy systems could use specialized appliances such as load balancers, and firewalls. However, the
SDN replaces the appliances with the applications that makes use of controller to control data plane
behavior (Lammle, 2016).
The SDN splits the network into three discrete layer connected via southbound and northbound APIS.
The 3 layers are infrastructure layer, control layer and application layer.
The infrastructure layer encompasses physical network switches.
The control layer signifies the centralized Software-defined network controller software which acts as
the processor of the SDN. The controller is positioned on the server and controls the guidelines and flow
of traffic all over the network.

(Calsoft, 2019)
Implementation of SDN from small scale to large scale.
In recent times, the amounts of network traffic has massively increased as a result of advances in smart
devices and smartphones. The user traffic has also become more complicated owing to requirements
and services of the clients. However, the legacy network infrastructure is not able to handle these
requirements since the legacy systems incorporate the control plane and forward plane in the same
device. SDN has been invented to rescue this (Browning, Tafa, Gheorghe, & Barinic, 2017). The following
are the ways SDN can be implemented into both small and large scale organizations using OpenFlow,
net-FPGA and Minnet emulator.
Minnet denotes to the emulator which includes collection of virtual switches, devices and end-hosts
which can be used to design virtual links. This technique is broadly utilized, howver, does not fully
support the performance and dynamicity of virtualized hosts.