Objective 5: Design of measurement and TE functions for SDN backbone networks

Motivation

The adoption of the SDN paradigm in core/provider backbones can offer big advantages regarding the monitoring of the traffic and, most importantly, allow for a much tighter control of the traffic, which may be exploited to implement traffic engineering (TE) functionalities far more effective than those available today. However, the need to coexist with legacy protocols together with the scaling constraints of this environment suggest that the adoption of the SDN in backbone/core IP networks will be partial.

The aim is to design an automated traffic engineering system able to make routing decisions based on the state of the network and the traffic measurement functions. New per-flow measurement techniques in core software-defined networks, with a focus toward the estimation of traffic matrices, will be investigated. This objective involves the evaluation of the applicability (scalability, operational feasibility) of Path Protection and OAM over multiple domains.