Towards to Inter-domain Network Operations for Dynamic Networks with Software Defined Networking (SDN)

In this paper, we introduce an Software Defined Networking (SDN)-based approach to support the network operations of heterogeneous hierarchical multi-domain Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs). Our approach offers several capabilities, including seamlessly interconnecting heterogeneous MANETs, reducing routing decision loads of gateway routers, and managing end-devices at the network edge from the Network Operation Center (NOC) with our SDN Proxy Protocol. To assess the feasibility of our proposed approach, we setup an emulation environment, and implement our designed system via the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), additionally integrating OLSRv2, OSPF-MDR, Babel, and others. Based on a set of designed test scenarios, we then carry out an extensive performance evaluation of our approach. Our experimental results show significant network performance improvements at the gateway routers. The SDN Proxy Protocol also outperforms the traditional CoAP-to-CoAP communication when network instability exists.