Technical Summary
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has been one of the major buzz
words of the networking industry for the past couple of years. And
yet, no clear definition of what SDN actually covers has been broadly
admitted so far. This document aims at contributing to the
clarification of the SDN landscape by providing a perspective on
requirements, issues and other considerations about SDN, as seen from
within a service provider environment.
It is not meant to endlessly discuss what SDN truly means, but rather
to suggest a functional taxonomy of the techniques that can be used
under a SDN umbrella and to elaborate on the various pending issues
the combined activation of such techniques inevitably raises. As
such, a definition of SDN is only mentioned for the sake of
clarification.
Working Group Summary
This is an individual submission not the product of a working
group.
The document was discussed within the SDNRG of the IRTF
from where useful feedback was gathered. One of the chairs
of the SDNRG and the chair of the IRTF have both confirmed
that they are OK with progressing this as an individual
submission. Doing that has led to IETF last call which
generated some additional feedback.
Care has been taken to word the document such that it can
gain IETF consensus for its content rather than just being the
authors' viewpoint.
Document Quality
This is an Informational I-D and not the subject of anything
that can be directly implemented.
The sponsoring AD reviewed the document and gave a
number of comments that led to updates.
Personnel
Adrian Farrel (Adrian@olddog.co.uk) is the Document
Shepherd and Responsible Area Director.