Traffic Engineering Enhancement by Progressive Migration to SDN

Software-defined networking (SDN) provides an unprecedented opportunity to enhance the traffic engineering in IP networks. This emerges from the fine-grained centralized control over routing, which enables an immediate response to network dynamics. However, due to the high operational and performance costs of the migration, network operators prefer a multi-period planning approach for the deployment of SDN-enabled devices. In this letter, we present and evaluate an efficient algorithm to seek a beneficial upgrade policy for a network considering the budget constraints. Our proposed algorithm outperforms the most recent work, particularly for large-scale topologies and an increased number of time periods.