Vendor Independent SDN Architecture Solution Hale D6nerta§li Beykent University hdonertasli@gmail.com Zeynep Altan Beykent University zeynepaltan@beykent.edu.tr Abstract—The evolution of mobile communication and its integration into our daily lives has led to a rapid increase in user data and new service innovations. The emergence of two new concepts Software Defined Network (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has radically changed the evolution of network functions and the architectures. While these concepts are considered as drivers for designing low-cost cloud network architectures, limited attention paid to architectural designs based on the harmony between and within the network layers that do not create vendor dependency for the system to operate end-to-end. Open-source standards have been published to ensure interoperability, but the standards do not contain details for each use case. SDN solutions developed by vendors are designed for commercial purposes, and these architectures are wholly or partly vendor dependent. Telecommunication companies are entering a vicious circle in their architectural designs. With 5G Technology offering more bandwidth, high demand of IoT (Internet of Things) increased the pressure of this vicious circle of telecommunication companies. In this paper, SDN Confederation architecture, which solves vendor dependence, is exemplified with Representational State Transfer Application Protocol Interface (REST API) and OpenFlow Experimenter messages working in harmony between and within the layers are presented. Keywords—Software Defined Network,Network Function Virtualization,Cloud Network Architecture,Vendor fndependent,Openfiow, Representational State Transfer Application Programming fnterface I. Introduction The two major technologies adopted in the last decade have had a huge impact on information technology: virtualization and cloud computing. Virtualization is the creation of a virtual version of an operating system, a server, a storage device, or the actual physical version of network resources. Cloud computing is the ability of using computing power over the cloud as a service. These two technologies have enabled network engineers and application architects to get the most out of their hardware. However, over time, the basic data network used by applications has developed less than virtualization and cloud computing. As bandwidth increases day by day, the use of network applications has also increased, but how the network setup will adapt to this increase has not been designed accordingly. Lack of infrastructure support in networking has brought automation constraints to application designers. Therefore, network device manufacturers have developed solutions to increase the flexibility and ease of use required by service providers and businesses. The purpose of these solutions is to respond to central control, programmability, orchestration and virtualization needs. The concept of SDN was bom in this way. As demand for SDN and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) based architectures is increasing, ONF (Open Networking Foundation), European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), International Telecommunication Union (ITU), 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), OpenStack and OpenDayLight have started to develop similar standards. However, there are shortcomings for the network operators in order to operate end to end. In this context since the solutions developed by open source organizations do not have well defined interfaces associated with the application and infrastructure layers of SDN architecture, operators have not received support in this regard. Since SDN architectural solutions developed by vendors are designed for commercial purposes, they work only with their own or partnership hardware and these architectures are wholly or partially vendor dependent. For these reasons, telecommunication companies are going through a vicious circle in their architectural designs. The proposed SDN Confederation architecture in this paper, is designed to break this vicious circle. The most critical architectural deficiency encountered in practice is not being able to dynamically integrate infrastructure and services in the form of network slices in cloud networks. The closest approach in the literature is the Service Function Chaining (SFC) published by IETF and Table Type Patterns (TTP) published by ONF. However, these standards alone are not sufficient to run modular service and application integration in cloud networks end to end within the network slices required by the nature of 5G. In the SDN Confederation architecture a new capability has been added to the controller that allows TTP and SFC to talk to each other by using Open Flow Experimenter messages. The main motivation of this study is to able to translate the dynamics of 5G Control and User Plane Separation (CUPS) enabled Service Based Architecture (SBA) into the automated chained network functions. II. Lit e r a t u r e Review ONF publishes standards which include technical recommendations and application interfaces for SDN to improve interoperability. These are classified as technical specifications, protocol definitions and modeling. The standards and news related to this study published by ONF are summarizedbelow: Creating a standard and making it publishable is a long process and until a standard is published, SDN users are moving to a new application in line with increasing 978-l-7281-7565-2/20/$31.00 ©2020 IEEE (UBMK'20) 5th International Conference on Computer Science and Engineering -1 Authorized licensed use limited to: ULAKBIM UASL - Beykent Universitesi. Downloaded on January 15,2021 at 11:58:32 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.