Interoperability in Software Defined Networking

Abstract

Today’s world emphasizes a lot on speed, performance and ease of use. Taking these demands into consideration it has become mandatory to change all existing systems and transform them into ones that can deliver these characteristics. One such system has been network architecture. Since many years vendors have been creating and developing their own Network Infrastructure, with different policies and different instruction sets. But communication between networks has taken up importance so as to reduce the timing taken by the data packet to pass through the security settings of another network and vice versa. Hence here is where Interoperability comes into play. If we can take all the networks and have a common controller for all the networks, it would reduce the time and complexity for communicating between them. A simple way to achieve it is through Software Defined Networking, where we can use the software to control the flow of data packets as well as monitor the network. But it is not so simple, interoperability has its own sets of issues like cost overhead, security and safety, speed and most importantly acceptability. Network vendors have been apprehensive about accepting SDN because of these concerns that plague it. This thesis looks at what SDN is and what are the several benefits of it. At the same time looking more into the Interoperability methods and how security concern can be alleviated. This is done by detecting and removing ARP spoofing from the network which is a major concern in modern day networks. Also network monitoring methods are seen which can be used for network speed optimization.