ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with the historical background on Software-Defined Networking (SDN). It covers SDN architecture and features and also covers various applications and benefits of SDN. The chapter presents the challenges hindering wide adoption of SDN. It also presents security as the major concern of researchers from academia and industry. SDN is a new computer networking architecture that uses standardized application programming interface. In traditional networks, most of the network functionality is in form of hardware such as like switches, routers, and gateways. SDN simplifies the traditional networking in two ways. First, the network now consists of uniform switching hardware with standard interfaces. Second, network control is not distributed but centralized and restricted to the controller. SDN is characterized by six fundamental features: separation of the data and control planes, centralization, programmability, network virtualization, resource abstraction, and openness.
