A Survey on Software Defined Network Plus White Box Switching

ABSTRACT-- Emerging mega trends like ?social media, mobile devices, cloud computing? are pursuing the traditional network to their limits. With the help of Internet, a digital society is creating but the conventional static architecture is ill suited for dynamic computing. The explosion of ?mobile devices and content, server virtualization and use of cloud services? are the new trends of networking industry that forces the traditional network to re-examine architecture. Today?s networking paradigm is changing continuously and it is very difficult to re-configure traditional IP network. The current networks are vertically integrated: that means the ?control? and ?data? planes are bundled together. The traditional approaches are based on manual configuration so it is cumbersome and error prone, and also the physical network infrastructure is not fully utilized. ?Software Defined Network? is an emerging architecture that is most promising solution for future and can change the state of affairs. Software defined network is ?dynamic, manageable, cost-effective and adaptable?. It gives us a solution of handling high bandwidth, working with big data. It gives us the flexibility to work with open standards. The goal of the SDN is enabling cloud and network administrators to respond quickly changing requirement through a ?centralized control console?. White Box Switching is the ability to use generic, off-the-shelf switching technique and routing hardware in the forwarding plane of SDN. White Box Switches supports a variety of development tools, several automation capacities and it let the developers to focus on networking process. Open flow is used to program the forwarding table of white box switches by SDN controller. White box switches are also flexible so it supports a range of open source management tools. Why white box switches are best suited for SDN is the main purpose of this paper. In particular, we will focus on the ?design of white box switches? and ?control platforms? ? on aspects such as ?resiliency, scalability, performance, security and dependability?.