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Top2. Software Defined Networking
The network is comprised of a number of devices which are connected to share the information from one place to another. One good example of a network is the internet. The Internet-based, business organizations and industries need to change their network configurations dynamically according to their business requirements. To achieve these changes over the traditional network is the one biggest challenge. The complex traditional network creates a barrier for data centers to innovate new services, interconnect different data centers, interconnection with enterprises, etc. A new approach needs to be looked at to overcome these issues. This is where software defined network (SDN) comes to manage and configure the network as per industry business needs from a central location through programming.
In a traditional network, the main components of a device are data, management, and control plane. However, the control plane is responsible for routing, i.e. to identify the path to transfer the data towards the destination using routing algorithms. The data plane may also be referred as the forwarding plane, as it is accountable to send the network traffic to the next node along the path selected by the control plane for the respective destination. The management plane helps to manage both the control and the data plane. However, in such traditional network, the data and the control plane is combined in a single physical device (router). The control plane will be effectively separated from data plane in the SDN network (Kreutz et al., 2015) and acts as a centralized software controller. Therefore, the controller provides programming functionality that allows a supervisor to organize and manage the network as per needs. SDN network having centralized control plane provides a global view, such that the flows are planned based on defined network policies to support traffic engineering, security, load balancing, etc. (Hayward et al., 2015). The following Figure 1 illustrates the architecture of SDN.