A novel qualitative metric based approach to the improvement of data plane flexibility in software-defined networks

The software-defined networking (SDN) is an articulation of the idea of increasing the network programmability with the aim of solving the problems identified in earlier research, regarding the complex and the time-consuming process of the protocol and interface standardization. An analysis of research in the field of SDN, presented through various review and survey papers, has shown that previous research was not sufficiently focused on flexibility and programmability of the data plane in SDN. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to improve the flexibility of the data plane in SDN by increasing the programmability level of the packet-switching node. To achieve the set goal, it was necessary to choose an appropriate metric for evaluation of flexibility and programmability of the data plane. Since there is no common position on the choice of metrics, a novel metric based on qualitative criteria is proposed in this paper. An existing data plane architectures in SDN are observed through the proposed metric. In the end, a novel data plane architecture, with improved flexibility from the aspect of the qualitative metric, is proposed.