Um estudo experimental do plano de controle em redes definidas por software.

Abstract

Computer networks are a part of people’s everyday life, becoming more large and complex each time. However, this growth also adds problems, as a network unadaptable to changes. Due to this, the Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm appears to solve the current found difficulties, it preaches the separation of the network in three different schemes, the data scheme, the control scheme and the application scheme, each one with its distinct tasks. This scheme separation, brings flexibility to SDN to manage the network, having a programmable interface that allows the programation of behaviours and services for the network in a controller. Despite this, the network research community, brings up various questions on how the distribution of control plans should be organized to better attend the necessities of the network. Based on this problem, the objective of the present work was to help in the evolution of the current scenario of SDN networks. The main contributions of this work can be stated as: (i) a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art referring to the different ways to plan an SDN network; (ii) the study and practical experimentation of a testbed environment to emulate different scenarios related to distinct control plane organizations, all that by using a set of well-established components in industry and academia, and (iii) the execution of an practical analysis using the environment developed to emulate a set of different network organization scenarios aiming to answer to two well-defined questions, the first dealing with network responsiveness, while the second seeks to understand how the intense communication interactions can that affect the control plan of SDN networks.