A Brief Overview of Software-Defined Networking

The Internet is the driving force of the new digital world, which has created a revolution. With the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT), almost everything is being connected to the internet. However, with the traditional IP network system, it is computationally very complex and costly to manage and configure the network, where the data plane and the control plane are tightly coupled. In order to simplify the network management tasks, software-defined networking (SDN) has been proposed as a promising paradigm shift towards an externalized and logically centralized network control plane. SDN decouples the control plane and the data plane and provides programmability to configure the network. To address the overwhelming advancement of this new technology, a holistic overview of SDN is provided in this paper by describing different layers and their functionalities in SDN. The paper presents a simple but effective overview of SDN, which will pave the way for the readers to understand this new technology and contribute to this field.