SDN-enabled Application-aware networking for Datacenter networks

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a networking paradigm that decouples the control plane of a network from its forwarding plane and offers programmability of the data plane devices  to  manage  and  control  the  ongoing  traffic  flows.  This paper  presents  the  control  plane  architecture  of  a  Datacentre network  (DCN)  and  its  operational  services  being  developed for  NEPHELEs  optical  network  infrastructure.  The  heart  of the proposed  control  plane  overlay  is  an  OpenDaylight  SDN controller, which along-with its north and south-bound interfaces bridges  the  gap  between  the  cloud  applications  and  the  DC network configuration at the data plane, in order to automatically adjust  the  underlying  network  to  the  Quality  of  Service  (QoS) requirements at the application level. An application based traffic shaping use case is presented as a proof of concept of applicationaware networking in SDN-enabled data center networks.