SDN Research Challenges and Opportunities

The National Science Foundation has made investments in Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) for many years, in both the research and infrastructure areas. SDN and NFV enable systems to become more open to transformative research, with implications for revolutionary new applications and services. Additionally, the emerging concept of Software-Defined Exchanges will enable large-scale interconnection of Software Defined infrastructures, owned and operated by many different organizations, to provide logically isolated 'on demand' global scale infrastructure on an end-to-end basis, with enhanced flexibility and security for new applications. This talk will examine past NSF investments and successes in SDN/NFV, identify new research opportunities available to the community and present challenges that need to be overcome to make SDN/NFV a reality in operational cyberinfrastructure.