Enabling a Carrier Grade SDN by Using a Top-Down Approach

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) essentially decouples the hardware from the software that controls it. Currently, OpenFlow materializes some SDN abstractions and several OpenFlow controllers, based on different programming paradigms and architectures, are available. In this scenario, SDN community is using a bottom-up approach in order to build a SDN control layer that meets carrier grade requirements such as throughput, availability and scalability. Conversely, this work proposes a top-down approach for SDN controller architecture that is integrated with a carrier grade service level execution environment, based on the JAIN SLEE specification. The proposed approach reuses a mature component model, already deployed, thus extending SDN based services by integrating OpenFlow with several network resources and communication protocols providing a cross layer platform that can satisfy these telecom operators requirements.