Economic Impact Analysis of Control Plane Architectures in Software Defined Networking (SDN)

Economical and operational facets of networks drive the necessity for significant changes towards fundamentals of networking architectures. Recently, the momentum of programmable networking attempts illustrates the significance of economic aspects of network technologies. Software Defined Networking (SDN) has got the attention of researchers from both academia and industry as a means to decrease network costs and generate revenue for service providers due to features it promises in networking. In this article, we perform an economic analysis of SDN about different popular SDN control plane architectures: Centralized Control Plane (CCP), Distributed Control Plane with Local View (DCP_LV), and Hierarchical Control Plane (HCP) model. In particular, we investigate the economic impact of these control plane architectures about the unit cost for a service with bandwidth QoS parameter as well as Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and network revenue for network owners under different traffic patterns. We characterize the unit cost for a service concerning CAPEX, OPEX, and workload of a network in a certain time period and apply the calculation methods in different SDN control plane models. Our experiments and analysis show that CCP model shows the highest TCO while DCP_LV model results in lowest amount among them. In addition, HCP model shows the lowest unit cost for a service among all models while CCP gives the highest cost for the same service tier. This work aims at being a useful primer to providing insights regarding the economic impact of control plane architectures in SDN for network researchers and owners to plan their investments.