Paving the Way towards Enterprise SDN Adoption: New Selection Strategies for Hybrid Networks

Software Defined Networking (SDN) becomes more popular recently as an emerging computer networks paradigm, especially in data centers and WAN networks. In enterprise networks, however there are challenges from both technical and financial aspects in SDN adoption that needed to be tackled. Some proposals rely on upgrading the minimal set of switches to reach a full SDN control of the network, allowing incremental network upgrades. Nevertheless, existing proposals for switch selection either employ a basic selection strategy or use a heuristic that does not consider the whole network status, leading to upgrading more switches than needed which yields in more migration cost. In this paper, we present four different strategies for switch selection. We implemented and evaluated them against the state-of-the-art. Our results show that, the strategies that consider the whole network traffic status are able to achieve full SDN hybrid coverage with fewer SDN-enabled switches, saving up to 62% compared to existing strategies.