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HARMLESS: Cost-Effective Transitioning to SDN

Published: 22 August 2017 Publication History
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  • Abstract

    Recently, Software-Defined Networking has grown out of being an "intriguing approach" and turned into a "must-have" for communication networks to overcome many long-standing problems of traditional networking. However, there are still some obstacles on the way to the widespread adoption. Current commodity-off-the-shelf (COTS) SDN offerings are still in their infancy and are notorious for lacking standards compliance, scalability, and unpredictable performance indicators compared to their legacy counterparts. On the other hand, recent software-based solutions might mitigate these shortcomings, but in terms of cost-efficiency and port density they are in a lower league.
    Here, we present HARMLESS, a novel SDN switch design that combines the rapid innovation and upgrade cycles of software switches with the port density of hardware-based appliances into a fully data plane-transparent, vendor-neutral and cost-effective solution for smaller enterprises to gain a foothold in this era. The demo showcases the SDN migration of a dumb legacy Ethernet switch to a powerful, fully reconfigurable, OpenFlow-enabled network device without incurring any major performance and latency penalty, nor any substantial price tag enabling to realize many use cases that would have otherwise needed standalone hardware appliances.

    References

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2023)Packet processing and data plane program verification: A survey with tools, techniques, and challengesInternational Journal of Communication Systems10.1002/dac.555436:14Online publication date: 14-Jun-2023
    • (2020)Transition to SDN is HARMLESS: Hybrid Architecture for Migrating Legacy Ethernet Switches to SDNIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2019.295876228:1(275-288)Online publication date: 14-Feb-2020
    • (2019)A Survey of Deployment Solutions and Optimization Strategies for Hybrid SDN NetworksIEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials10.1109/COMST.2018.287106121:2(1483-1507)Online publication date: Oct-2020
    • Show More Cited By

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    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGCOMM Posters and Demos '17: Proceedings of the SIGCOMM Posters and Demos
    August 2017
    158 pages
    ISBN:9781450350570
    DOI:10.1145/3123878
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 22 August 2017

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    Author Tags

    1. Migration
    2. Software-Defined Networking
    3. Switch design

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    • Demonstration
    • Research
    • Refereed limited

    Conference

    SIGCOMM '17
    Sponsor:
    SIGCOMM '17: ACM SIGCOMM 2017 Conference
    August 22 - 24, 2017
    CA, Los Angeles, USA

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2023)Packet processing and data plane program verification: A survey with tools, techniques, and challengesInternational Journal of Communication Systems10.1002/dac.555436:14Online publication date: 14-Jun-2023
    • (2020)Transition to SDN is HARMLESS: Hybrid Architecture for Migrating Legacy Ethernet Switches to SDNIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2019.295876228:1(275-288)Online publication date: 14-Feb-2020
    • (2019)A Survey of Deployment Solutions and Optimization Strategies for Hybrid SDN NetworksIEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials10.1109/COMST.2018.287106121:2(1483-1507)Online publication date: Oct-2020
    • (2018)HARMLESS: Cost-Effective Transitioning to SDN for Small Enterprises2018 IFIP Networking Conference (IFIP Networking) and Workshops10.23919/IFIPNetworking.2018.8696504(1-9)Online publication date: May-2018

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