Economic Analysis of Software Defined Networking (SDN) Under Various Network Failure Scenarios

Abstract

Failures are inevitable in an operational network. They can happen anytime in different sizes and components of a network. They impact the network economics regarding CAPEX (Capital Expenditure), OPEX (Operational Expenditure), revenue lost due to service provisioning cut and so on. In order to mitigate the damages resulting from these failures, reactions of network architectures and designs are crucial for the future of the network. Recently, Software Defined Networking (SDN) has got the attention of researchers from both academia and industry as a means in order to increase network availability and reliability due to features, such as centralized automated control and global network view, it promises in networking. To this end, we explore the effects of programmable network architectures, i.e. SDN technology, and traditional network architectures, i.e. MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) technology, on network economics by exploiting Number of Satisfied Service Requests and our predefined Unit Service Cost Scalability metrics under network failure scenarios: i) a random single data plane link failure and ii) a random controller (i.e. control plane) failure. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to consider a comparison of a programmable network architecture, i.e. SDN, along with different control plane models, Centralized (Single) Control Plane (CCP), Distributed (Flat) Control Plane (DCP), and Hierarchical Control Plane (HCP), and a non-programmable network architecture, i.e. MPLS, regarding network economics in case of network failures.