3rd International Workshop on Industrial Issues and Solutions such as Scalability and Reliability for Software Defined Networking (SRSDN’21)
Software Defined Networking (SDN) has gained a lot of attention over the last ten years and has been considered as an evolutionary breakthrough for the next-generation network technologies. It enables fine-grained flow control that can make networks more customizable and flexible. Today, SDN is deployed in a wide range of contexts: e.g., enterprise and campus networks, datacenter networks, wide-area networks as well as Internet Exchange centers. However, the transition of traditional networking model to SDN architectures poses scalability issues due to the possible flow entry explosion in SDN switches. The limited size of flow table of SDN switches is not sufficient to handle the thousands upon thousands flows in an Internet-scale network, which decreases the feasibility of implementation of large-scale IP-based SDN severely.
Despite the many deployments, today's SDNs are of small scale, e.g., limited to a small network or to a single administrative domain. The next major challenge thus resides in scaling up SDNs. The scope of this workshop is research that addresses the challenge of deploying SDN at scale. Large-scale SDNs may span thousands of switches and routers, for a network that may span large geographic areas and carry millions of flows. Such scenarios require highly scalable control and management planes as well as applications to handle the large amount of control traffic. In addition to the control plane and SDN applications, the data plane must also be scalable. Finally, for cost reasons and to gain confidence in the new technology, software-defined networks should be deployable incrementally.
On the other hand, SDN becomes more complex due to new and multi-lateral network domains, and poses many critical challenges on the existing network reliability mechanisms in order to achieve the same reliability services. While the controller makes it exceptionally convenient for a network operator to control and manage a network, the controller requires complex logic and becomes a single point of failure within the network. As a result, configuration errors by the controller could be extremely costly for the network provider. Ultimately, one major source of this complexity are network failures, as they trigger execution of unexplored portions of code; these network failures are inevitable, costly, and considering all possible interleaving of bugs is simply infeasible.
In this workshop, we are seeking novel approaches and unpublished work related to scalability and reliability issues and solutions for SDN. In particular, we would like to focus on recent developments in protocols, application design, and architecture specification for achieving scalability and reliability in SDN in various contexts such as:
- SDN-Based Datacenter networks, Enterprise networks, Campus networks, Large-Scale Wide-Area networks, 4G/5G Mobile Networks, etc.
- Scalability and Reliability issues at SDN Control Planes
- Scalability and Reliability issues at SDN Data Planes
- SDN Applications and Algorithms (e.g., Traffic Engineering, Mobile Management, Network Slicing, Multi-Tenancy, etc.)
- SDN deployment Issues (e.g., Non-SDN to SDN Incremental Migration, Non-SDN and SDN Hybrid Deployment)
- Scalable and Reliable Service Orchestration, Operational Support, and System Management for SDNs
- Scalable and Reliable Control Protocols, API and Programming Languages for SDNs
- Scalable and Reliable Hardware Architectures and Programmable Pipelines (e.g., NetFPGA, Crossbar, TCAM etc.)
- Precise Time-synchronization in the SDNs
- Experimental Approaches for Scalability and Reliability Issues in SDNs
- Scalable and Reliable SDN-Based Network Function Virtualization (NFV), Cloud and Fog Computing
- Next-Generation Network Softwarization Architectures
- Standardization and Interoperability for Large-scale SDN (e.g., Openflow, OpenDaylight, Inter SDN Controller Communication (SDNi) etc.)
- New Value Chains and Business Models for SDN