Achievement Award
Realization of SDN concept and commercialization of SDN/OpenFlow products through agile open innovation approaches
Atsushi Iwata, Hideyuki Shimonishi, Masayoshi Kobayashi

Atsushi Iwata
Hideyuki Shimonishi
Masayoshi Kobayashi		      
@The current Internet network control uses autonomous distributed routing control with network equipment having built-in control functions, which are rather difficult to upgrade with new additional features. The network equipment tends to have various kinds of legacy-compatible functions, which lead to complexity of network equipment software. Rapidly growing markets, such as data centers (DCs) and cloud computing, need quick adaptive automation of network design, provisioning, and management of the required network resources interconnecting servers and storages in the DC, whenever server and storage configurations change as a result of customer requests. However, since the autonomous distributed routing control is unpredictable in terms of performance owing to its inherit communication delay and its distributed behavior, network operators have not been able to change the network configurations quickly and reliably.
  In order to meet these new requirements, the award winners proposed a new network paradigm, Software Defined Networking (SDN), which provides dynamic network design, provisioning, and management via a logically centralized and programmable network control scheme, and also proposed its pragmatic fundamental protocol, OpenFlow, to achieve the objectives of SDN, as shown in Figure.1. This has led to an innovation in the networking industry, which typically occurs once every 20 year.
  In 2007, the award winners began open innovation research activities with Stanford University in the USA to realize their new innovation from the beginning stage of the OpenFlow/SDN era. Within this activity, the SDN concept was developed and its core protocol, OpenFlow, was designed, standardized, and validated in all US campus networks in an agile fashion, where numerous design and test cycles were carried out step by step to validate the usefulness of those designs in actual scalable deployments. As a result of this joint experience, NEC successfully achieved the worldfs first wire-rate hardware-based OpenFlow switch prototype systems. Since then, those prototype systems have been successfully widely deployed in a US wide-area network testbed, GENI, and a Japan wide-area network testbed, JGN-X, enabling the operation of new network services among multiple universities and research organizations.
  Thus a Software-Defined system was proved to be realizable in a real operational network for the first time in the world, illuminating the path to be followed by a network industry evolving toward a software-vendor-driven innovative infrastructure development style. This result can be regarded as a remarkable achievement in the network industry.
  NEC succeeded in commercializing OpenFlow/SDN products, a series of ProgrammableFlow switches and controller, in 2011 for the first time in the world, for DC, enterprise, and public market sectors, where user needs are clearly identified. The ProgrammableFlow controller consists of an SDN controller software platform, Network OS, and the SDN applications on it. The function provided by the Network OS enables the abstraction of network equipment functions by OpenFlow to describe topology, network resource, and network policies as a logical representation, and also enables software developers to write the SDN applications on it. The default built-in SDN applications with the ProgrammableFlow controller include several value-added service applications, such as the visualization of network topology and status, dynamic creation of secure virtual tenant networks, route optimizations of network traffic, and service chaining of network appliances. A great number of various kinds of users have deployed this product commercially. In the carrier DC sector, this product has been deployed to achieve a dynamic cloud resource optimization in geographically distributed DCs. In the enterprise sector, this product has been deployed to share multiple network resources in different departments as well as to provide multiple different security policy operations without any misoperation, which were often caused by human network operations, as shown in Figure 2. This operation realizes the reduction of both network construction cost and network operation cost. In the public market sector, this product has been deployed to provide a central management of network operations of a large scale mission critical system in a geographically distributed network. Such operations are abstracted as a single virtual network resource and are shared by different kinds of systems. As described above, OpenFlow/SDN can dramatically change the way of existing network design, provisioning, and operation, and is expected to provide a cost-effective solution for network operators, and also to create an innovative network service environment.
  In addition, recently, numerous telecom carriers in the world are beginning to pay attention to a combination of SDN and Network Function Virtualization (NFV), which virtualizes network equipment functions as a cloud software, leading to flexible network installment and management. NEC has developed many SDN-enabled NFV products, including Virtualized Evolved Packet Core (vEPC) and Virtualized Customer Premises Equipment (vCPE), where network functions are virtualized as software and those functions and their performance can be dynamically reconfigured by network control software. NEC has also succeeded in various joint trials with multiple telecom network operators for the first time in the world. Through these trial results, the realization of the SDN concept in commercial telecom operator networks is becoming a real future direction of telecom networks. SDN is now being widely accepted as an enabling technology of social infrastructure that provides safety, security, and efficiency to the customers.
  In summary, the award winners proposed the SDN concept with Stanford University, and succeeded in commercializing its core technology, OpenFlow, as products for the first time in the world. The product, ProgrammableFlow, can achieve the software-defined system construction via the logically centralized and programmable network control scheme. This is an innovative new network system concept that can provide a cost-effective solution for network operators as well as for creating an innovative network service environment. Therefore, the achievements of the award winners are remarkable and worthy of receiving the IEICE Achievement Award.


Fig. 1@@Unique features of logically centralized and programmable control scheme based on OpenFlow/SDN


Fig. 2@@Flexible network management and reliable security control for the enterprise network provided by ProgrammableFlow product
References
  1. i1jBen Pfaff, Brandon Heller, Dan Talayco, David Erickson, Glen Gibb, Guido Appenzeller, Jean Tourrilhes, Justin Pettit, KK Yap, Martin Casado, Masayoshi Kobayashi, Nick McKeown, Peter Balland, Reid Price, Rob Sherwood, Yiannis Yiakoumis, gOpenFlow Switch Specification Version 1.0.0,h http://archive.openflow.org/documents/openflow-spec-v1.0.0.pdf, December 2009.
  2. i2jMasayoshi Kobayashi, Srini Seetharaman, Guru Parulkar, Guido Appenzeller, Joseph Little, Johan Van Reijendam, Paul Weissmann, Nick Mckeown, gMaturing of OpenFlow and Software-defined Networking through deployments,h Computer Networks, Vol. 61, pp. 151-175, March 2014.
  3. i3jKok-Kiong Yap, Masayoshi Kobayashi, Nikhil Handigol, Te-Yuan Huang, Michael Chan, Rob Sherwood, and Nick McKeown, gOpenRoads: Empowering Research in Mobile Networks,h ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review , Vol. 40, No. 1, pp. 125-126, January 2010 (ACM SIGCOMM 2008 Poster Session Best Poster Award).
  4. i4jMasayoshi Kobayashi, gSoftware defined Networking and OpenFlow: Challenges and Opportunitiesh, Keynote at IEEE/IFIP ManFI Workshop, April 2012.
  5. i5jHideyuki Shimonishi and Shuji Ishii, "Virtualized network infrastructure using OpenFlow," In Proc. of International Workshop on Broadband Convergence Networks, pp. 4-79, Apr 2010.
  6. i6jHideyuki Shimonishi et al., gArchitecture Implementation, and Experiments of Programmable Network Using OpenFlowh, IEICE Transactions 94-B(10): 2715-2722, 2011.
  7. i7jAtsushi Iwata, gOpenFlow/SDN technologies for cloud and for flexible and cost-effective transport,h SDN/MPLS 2012 International Conference, http://www.isocore.com/mpls2012/program/technical_sessions.htm, Nov.2012.
  8. i8jTakashi Shimizu, Tetsuya Nakamura, Shigeru Iwashina, Wataru Takita (NTT DOCOMO. INC., Japan); Atsushi Iwata, Michio Kiuchi (NEC Corporation, Japan); Yoshihiro Kubota, Masahiko Ohhashi (Fujitsu Ltd., Japan), gAn Experimental evaluation for dynamic virtualized networking resource control over an evolved packet core network,h TS10, IEEE R10-HTC2013.
  9. i9jAtsushi Iwata, gSDN market trend and future directions,h The Journal of IEICE, Vol. 96, No. 12, pp. 910-915, Dec. 2013.
  10. i10jAtsushi Iwata, gInnovation for network businesses by the worldfs first SDN WAN technologies - O3 project - ,g SDN/MPLS2014 International Conference,
    http://www.isocore.com/sdn-mpls/technical_sessions.htm, Nov.2014.
 

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