EasyWay: simplifying and automating enterprise network management with SDN/OpenFlow

This paper presents new high level abstractions to manage the whole network at once: "names", "groups", "paths" instead of low level traditional IPs, subnets, routes. We called this approach as semantic network management where administrators simply say what they want from the network but not how and a SDN/OpenFlow controller will automatically program the network elements. All low level details are hidden from administrators (e.g., choosing IP addressing scheme). We implemented the proposed approach in a new SDN/OpenFlow-based network management system for enterprise networks called EasyWay.