Software defined networking (SDN) is emerging as a promising architectural solution to support and foster innovation in telecommunication networks. Several switch and router vendors are “opening” their hardware, offering APIs to allow for “software defined” control of the networking operations. The vitality of the SDN approach is witnessed by the release of several SDN tools and development environments, most of which are open sourced.
The first edition of the European Workshop on Software Defined Networks was held in Darmstadt on the 25th & 26th of October 2012. The goal was bringing together both: industry and academia on the topics of SDN. The European research projects, funded by the EU under the Seventh Framework Programme, provided the ground and contributed to the workshop ideation and realization.
Traditional strengths of European research and development have been in optical transmission and wireless, especially cellular networks. The workshop emphasized aspects of software defined networks that come up when extending SDN “beyond Ethernet.” In this regard, use of “European” was not meant at all to restrict the workshop to a geographic scope— contributions and participants from all over the world were welcomed.
Twenty scientific papers from academic and industrial research were included in the proceedings. Beyond 15 papers coming from the regular call for papers, a further 5 papers belong to a special session for the highest ranked proposals in the context of the second open call of the OFELIA project. The paper selection process was carried out with the help of the reviews performed by the Technical Program Committee members. The papers in the special session for OFELIA were reviewed and accepted under the direct responsibility of the TPC co-chairs.
To strengthen the industrial participation and the cooperation with academia, an industry track featuring 10 SDN related presentations from leading technology providers and network providers have been set up. A panel about open hardware and open software for SDN completed the program.
The ALIEN project had been presented by Artur Binczewski (PSNC) – the ALIEN project coordinator. There had been presented the ALIEN project objectives, challenges, proposed concepts and solution of the existing network problems as well as major project milestones and expected results.
Further information is available at the events website:
