Soft Migration from Traditional to Software Defined Networks

Sammanfattning: The concept of Software Defined Networking (SDN) may be a way to face the fast growing computer network infrastructure with its demands and requirements. The concept is attracting the interest of enterprises to expand their respective network infrastructures, but one has to consider the impacts of migrating from an existing network infrastructure to an SDN network. One way that could minimize the impacts is to proceed a soft migration from a traditional IP network to SDN, creating what is so called a heterogeneous network. Instead of fully replacing the network infrastructure and face the impacts of it, the idea of the soft migration is to replace a part of it with an environment of SDN and examine the performance of it. This thesis work will analyze the performance of a network consisting of a traditional IP network combined with SDN. It is essential during this work to identify the differences in performance when having a heterogeneous network in comparison with having a dedicated traditional IP network. Therefore, the questions that will be addressed during this thesis work is to examine how such a heterogeneous network can be designed and measure the performance of it in terms of throughput, jitter and packet losses. By the method of experimentation and the studying of related works of the SDN fundamentals, we hope to achieve our goals with this thesis work, to give us and the reader a clearer insight.