When big data meets software-defined networking: SDN for big data and big data for SDN.

Both big data and software-defined networking (SDN) have attracted great interests from both academia and industry. These two important areas have traditionally been addressed separately in the most of previous works. However, on the one hand, the good features of SDN can greatly facilitate big data acquisition, transmission, storage, and processing. On the other hand, big data will have profound impacts on the design and operation of SDN. In this paper, we present the good features of SDN in solving several issues prevailing with big data applications, including big data processing in cloud data centers, data delivery, joint optimization, scientific big data architectures and scheduling issues. We show that SDN can manage the network efficiently for improving the performance of big data applications. In addition, we show that big data can benefit SDN as well, including traffic engineering, cross-layer design, defeating security attacks, and SDN-based intra and inter data center networks. Moreover, we discuss a number of open issues that need to be addressed to jointly consider big data and SDN in future research.