The advent of SDN has brought a plethora of new architectures and controller designs for many use-cases and scenarios. Existing SDN deployments focus on campus, datacenter and WAN networks. However, little research efforts have been devoted to the scenario of effectively controlling a full deployment of end-nodes (e.g. smartphones) that are transient and scattered across the Internet. In this paper, we present a rigorous analysis of the challenges associated with an SDN architecture for end-nodes, show that such challenges are not found in existing SDN scenarios, and provide practical design guidelines to address them. Then, and following these guidelines we present a reference architecture based on a decentralized, distributed and symmetric controller with a connectionless pull-oriented southbound and an intent-driven northbound. Finally, we measure a proof-of-concept deployment to assess the validity of the analysis as well as the architecture.
@article{arxiv.1803.06294,
title = {SDN for End-Nodes: Scenario Analysis and Architectural Guidelines},
author = {Alberto Rodriguez-Natal and Vina Ermagan and Kien Nguyen and Sharon Barkai and Yusheng Ji and Fabio Maino and Albert Cabellos-Aparicio},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.06294},
year = {2018}
}