practice

Doi: 10.1145/2240236.2240254

Article development led by queue.acm.org

An open standard that enables
software-defined networking.
By thoMAS A. LiMonCELLi
openFlow:
A Radical
new idea in
networking

cOMPuter netwOrKS haVe historically evolved box by box, with individual network elements occupying specific ecological niches as routers, switches, load balancers, network address translations (NATs), or firewalls. Software-defined networking proposes to overturn that ecology, turning the network as a whole into a platform and the individual network elements into programmable entities. The apps running on the network platform can optimize traffic flows to take the shortest path, just as the current distributed protocols do, but they can also optimize the network to maximize link utilization, create different reachability domains for different users, or make device mobility seamless.

OpenFlow, an open standard that enables software-
defined networking in IP networks, is a new network