An Operations and Management Framework for The Integrated Software Defined Network Environment

An important research challenge about the traditional Internet environment is to enable open networking architecture on which end users are able to innovate the Internet based on the technologies of network programmability, virtualization, and federation. The SDN (Software Defined Network) technology that includes OpenFlow protocol specifications, is suggested as a major driver for the open networking architecture, and is closely coupled with the classical Internet (non-SDN). Therefore, it is very important to keep the integrated SDN and non-SDN network infrastructure reliable from the view point of network operators and engineers. Under this background, this paper proposes an operations and management framework for the combined software defined network environment across not only a single-domain network, but also multi-domain networks. The suggested framework is designed to allow SDN controllers and DvNOC systems to interact with each other to achieve sustainable end-to-end user-oriented SDN and non-SDN integrated network environment. Plus, the proposed scheme is designed to apply enhanced functionalities on DvNOC to support four major network failure scenarios over the combined network infrastructure, mainly derived from SDN controllers, SDN devices, and the connected network paths.