BYOC: Bring Your Own Control a new concept to monetize SDN's openness

Abstract

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is supposed to bring flexibility, dynamicity and automation to today's network through a logically centralized network controller. We argue that reaching SDN's full capacities requires however the development of standardized programming capabilities on its top. In this paper we introduce “Bring Your Own Control” (BYOC) as a new concept providing a convenient framework structuring the openness of the SDN on its northbound side. We derive from the lifecycle characterizing the services deployed in an SDN, the parts of services the control of which may be delegated by the operator to external customers through dedicated application programming interfaces (API) located in the northbound interface (NBI). We argue that the exploitation of such services may noticeably be refined by the operator through various business models monetizing the openness of the SDN following the new paradigm of “Earn as Your Bring” (EaYB). We propose an analysis of BYOC and we illustrate our approach with several use cases.