The heterogeneous nature of the applications, technologies and equipment that today’s networks have to support has made the management of such infrastructures a complex task. The Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm has emerged as a promising solution to reduce this complexity through the creation of a unified control plane independent of specific vendor equipment. However, designing a SDN-based solution for network resource management raises several challenges as it should exhibit flexibility, scalability and adaptability. In this talk, we will review some of the main challenges associated with SDN-based solutions and present our recent contributions in that direction. We will introduce the new SDN-based management and control framework that we designed for fixed backbone networks to support for both static and dynamic resource management applications. We will also present a placement algorithm to determine the allocation of managers and controllers in the proposed architecture. Finally, we will introduce the signalling framework that we developed to allow the exchange of information in distributed management and control scenarios and demonstrate its benefits through a realistic network resource management use case for content distribution.

Daphne Tuncer is currently a Research Associate in the Communications and Information Systems Group (CISG) in the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University College London (UCL), UK. She obtained her Ph.D. in Electronic and Electrical Engineering from UCL in November 2013. Her research interests are in the areas of adaptive network resource management, software-defined networks and cache/content management.