Potential Themes for

research in SDN, NFV and

Internet Architecture

András Császár, Ericsson Research

Background
Existing and Near Future Research
› SDN › NFV
– (logically) centralized control plane – virtualizing servers and appliances that provide
– programmability for novel networking virtualization network functions
(abstraction) – by optimization and automation server costs can
– simplified network (re)configuration and policy be reduced
enforcement

› Key technology enablers towards cost reductions (in CAPEX and OPEX) and new
business models
› Bigger focus in network service providers / operators than on end-users
› Ongoing activities work on unifying SDN and NFV
– E.g., FP7 UNIFY or Software Network strand of the 5GPPP pre-structuring model
› Will soon have
– flexibly programmable services including network, compute and storage
– have solutions for abstracted and programmable resources domains, stacked recursively, where
the lowest level maybe a single node with its local resources
Potential research work topics in SDN, NFV and Internet Architecture | Public | © Ericsson AB 2014 | 2014-09-30 | Page 2
Further Themes 1.
New Applications

› Understand potential new applications and their new requirements

– Application layer is where innovation happens!
– E.g., Tactile Internet, Industrial Internet or industrial control applications
› The new SDN-NFV service platform is a good basis to support these
– E.g., latency requirements of Tactile-/Industrial-Internet by automatically placing servers as
close to the subscribers as possible

› Get the innovation ecosystem bootstrapped

› Still need realisations of novel and sensible applications on the SDN+NFV
service platforms

Potential research work topics in SDN, NFV and Internet Architecture | Public | © Ericsson AB 2014 | 2014-09-30 | Page 3
Further Themes 2.
SDN+NFV: On the Way to be the Basis of the
Future Internet 1.

› Multi-technology network domains is being worked on

› Telecom market fragmented, especially the EU

› Multi-operator inter-connect to construct (e.g. Pan-European) services is

needed
– Replacement of roaming in the flexibly programmable software networks’ world
– Multi-operator environment for control and orchestration
› East-west interfaces, and/or north-south interfaces between orchestrators?
› Protocol?
› What info is shared?
› What control and access can be allowed?

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Further Themes 3.
SDN+NFV: On the Way to be the Basis of the
Future Internet 2.

› A true end-to-end view requires still more

› Including and integrating resources in enterprise-/home-network premises

› Construct end-to-end end-user and enterprise services with a mix of resources

from the customer and multiple operators
– What information is shared, who is responsible for what, what type of applications can benefit
from such a case?

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Further Themes 4.
Hardware-Defined Networking

› Still a challenge for SDN or in particular for OpenFlow:

– Flexibly programmable,
– low power,
– high performance, and yet
– cost efficient hardware
› Even more significant in OpenFlow 2.0 and similar initiatives (e.g., PIF/POF)
– Role of HW acceleration
– Role of purpose oriented chips, ASICs, NPUs, CPUs

› A different angle of HDN: optics…

– …in the network, in the DCs, in the boards, in the chips  Optical Packet Switching research
to be re-loaded?
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Further Themes 5.
Platform Features of SDN&NFV Service
Environment

› What features, properties can be offered by the platform in an app-independent

manner?
– E.g., reliability, VM migration, dynamicity changes, etc.)
› What applications can rely on these built-in features?

› Needs detailed investigation and demonstrators

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Further Themes 6.
End-to-End Encryption and the Role of NW
Service Providers

› E2E encryption: a fact for most traffic

– What is the impact on the Internet architecture?
– Networks can hardly do any smart features with encrypted traffic
› Role of network service providers: plain bitpipe or is there more?
– We might reach the limits of over-provisioning at some point
– Network intelligence and smart network features could become more important
– Willingness to pay for quality (Qo*)

Needed:
› Knowledge about type/characteristics of encrypted traffic
› But should not raise end-user privacy violation issues
› Operators allying and incentivizing content providers and application developers
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Further Themes 7.
Application-Network Interface

We may see interest for:

› Very dynamic
› Ad-hoc requests for
› Secure end-to-end connections
› with QoS guarantees for flows
› finer granularity than 5-tuples (e.g. flows multiplexed in higher layers)

› (Traffic type reveal)

› Application-network interface to request network services
– Software interfaces but at much finer granularity than SDN currently

Potential research work topics in SDN, NFV and Internet Architecture | Public | © Ericsson AB 2014 | 2014-09-30 | Page 9
Highlights

› SDN & NFV

– Bootstrap SDN+NFV innovation ecosystem
› Realisations of novel and sensible applications on the SDN+NFV service platforms
– End-to-end
› Multi-operator inter-connect
› Including enterprise-/user-resources
› Hardware: programmable, high performance, low cost, low power
› End-to-end encryption: impacts and challenges
› Application-network interface for requesting advanced network services

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