A Simplified and Effective Solution for Hybrid SDN Network Deployment

Haisheng Yu, Wenyong Wang, Yan Liu, Lihong Cheng, Sai Zou

Abstract: Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is viewed as one of the effective solution for network management, which can provide flexible global control of the network. However, it is difficult to migrating from traditional networks to pure SDN networks in a short term due to many reasons, such as company budget and protocol compatibility. In order to obtain benefits from SDN with a low budget, a hybrid network is proposed, in which only a few SDN switches are needed to achieve flexible control and management. In this hybrid network, one customized server is necessary for obtaining the network information from legacy switches and communicating with SDN controller to manage networks. However, it is difficult to develop and deploy the architecture with custom servers. Therefore, a novel solution is proposed to deploy hybrid SDN network without the customized server. Firstly, a novel method is presented to replace the legacy switches with SDN switches as less as possible to obtain all the link utilizations. Secondly, a new load balancing strategy is proposed to flexibly manage the network and get high performance. Finally, a number of experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed solution.