Data-Driven Information Plane in Software-Defined Networking

The contemporary Internet has evolved from an academic infrastructure to a tremendous commercial network, serving as an indispensable information platform for human communications, but with inherent limitations such as complicated management and manual configuration. To overcome these limitations, the basic Internet architecture has unleashed an unprecedented wave of innovation over the past decade, and introduced a promising networking paradigm, software-defined networking (SDN), often referred to as a radical new idea in networking. SDN offers numerous potential benefits such as enhanced configuration, improved performance, and encouraged innovation in network architectures and operations, while undergoing unprecedented challenges due to the lack of global network-wide information. Nowadays, the emerging data-driven thought opens the era of the fourth paradigm for science research and transfers the design philosophy of future networks, based on the large-scale data rather than the small-scale data. We argue that the existence of a data-driven information plane in SDN can address these challenges. In this article, we explicitly propose a data-driven information plane and extend the SDN architecture specifically. We first overview the evolution of SDN, and then illustrate a novel SDN paradigm by introducing a data-driven information plane into the commonly accepted SDN reference architecture. Finally, we outline emerging challenges and discuss future directions for further research triggered by a data-driven information plane.