Improving Network Management with Software Defined Networking

Network Management is very challenging. The Maintenance, operating and providing a secured communication network is very complex. It requires the network operators to grapple low-level vendor specific configurations to implement the high level network policies which are complex. The rigidity of underlying infrastructure presents few possibilities of improvement or innovation, since network devices are generally closed and vertically integrated. The solution to this problem is a new paradigm in networking; software defined networking (SDN), which advocates the separation of data plane and control plane. This separation makes the network switches in the data plane as simple packet forwarding devices and leaving a logically centralized software program to control the behavior of the entire network. We focus on three problems in network management. They are enabling frequent changes to network conditions and state, providing support for network configuration in high level language and providing better visibility and control over tasks for performing network trouble shooting.