Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has received a lot of attention in recent years as a means of addressing some of the long-standing challenges in networking. SDN starts from two simple ideas: generalize network hardware so it provides a standard collection of packet-processing functions instead of a fixed set of narrow features, and decouple the software that controls the network from the devices that implement it. This design makes it possible to evolve the network without having to change the underlying hardware and enables expressing network algorithms in terms of appropriate abstractions for particular applications.
@article{casado-cacm14,
author = "Mart\`{i}n Casado and Nate Foster and Arjun Guha",
title = "Abstractions for {S}oftware-{D}efined {N}etworks",
journal = "Communications of the {ACM}",
volume = 57,
number = 10,
year = 2014,
pages = "86--95"
}