Improving network management with software defined networking

Network management is challenging. To operate, maintain, and secure a communication network, network operators must grapple with low-level vendor-specific configuration to implement complex high-level network policies. Despite many previous proposals to make networks easier to manage, many solutions to network management problems amount to stop-gap solutions because of the difficulty of changing the underlying infrastructure. The rigidity of the underlying infrastructure presents few possibilities for innovation or improvement, since network devices have generally been closed, proprietary, and vertically integrated. A new paradigm in networking, software defined networking (SDN), advocates separating the data…