On the Network Slicing for Enterprise Services with Hybrid SDN

Nowadays, companies strongly rely on Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to deliver services between geographically distributed branch offices. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) must therefore offer a reliable and cost-effective connectivity solution. VPNs are commonly based on static bandwidth allocation over MPLS tunnels, which cause over-provisioning and underutilization of network resources. Software Defined Networking (SDN) appears as a solution to provide agile enterprise networking while reducing operators cost. This paper presents the design and implementation of a Hybrid SDN-based network application to provide dynamic services. Such an architecture enables combining centralized and distributed control with traditional VPN protocols to provision services through network slices. The application performs a flexible policy-based routing, selecting the access technology according to the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements and the network conditions. The simulations executed over an VIRL emulated environment by Cisco show that the proposed network control enables the services to be efficiently provisioned without the need of over-provisioning the resources. Furthermore, a customized network slicing over legacy equipment guarantees the service requirements.