A roadmap for traffic engineering in SDN-OpenFlow networks

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging networking paradigm that separates the network control plane from the data forwarding plane with the promise to dramatically improve network resource utilization, simplify network management, reduce operating cost, and promote innovation and evolution. Although traffic engineering techniques have been widely exploited in the past and current data networks, such as ATM networks and IP/MPLS networks, to optimize the performance of communication networks by dynamically analyzing, predicting, and regulating the behavior of the transmitted data, the unique features of SDN require new traffic engineering techniques that exploit the global network view, status, and flow patterns/characteristics available for better traffic control and management. This paper surveys the state-of-the-art in traffic engineering for SDNs, and mainly focuses on four thrusts including flow management, fault tolerance, topology update, and traffic analysis/characterization. In addition, some existing and representative traffic engineering tools from both industry and academia are explained. Moreover, open research issues for the realization of SDN traffic engineering solutions are discussed in detail. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.