Towards Island Networks: SDN-Enabled Virtual Private Networks with Peer-to-Peer Overlay Links for Edge Computing.

While solutions to many challenges posed by IoT lie at the network's edge, they cannot forego services available in the cloud which has over a decade of research and engineering to be leveraged. To bridge this gap, hybrid approaches in networking that account for characteristics of both edge and cloud systems are necessary. On cloud data centers, significant progress has been made on applying Software Defined Networking (SDN) to address networking challenges such as scalability, addressing, virtualization, and traffic engineering; administrators are now well-versed at managing data center SDN deployments in enterprise systems. However, the applicability of SDN in edge networks has not yet been thoroughly investigated. We propose a hybrid system that incorporates SDN software switches and overlay networks to build dynamic layer 2 virtual networks connecting hosts across the edge (and in the cloud) with links that are peer-to-peer Internet tunnels. These tunnels are terminated as subordinate devices to SDN switches and seamlessly enable the traditional SDN functionalities such that cloud and edge resources can be aggregated.