Deployment and operation of wide-area hybrid OpenFlow networks

The approach of deploying hybrid wide-area Open-Flow networks is essentially important for gradual deployment of the OpenFlow technology into existing wide-area networks because it is impractical to replace such wide-area networks with OpenFlow-enabled ones at once. On the other hand, the design, deployment, and operation of such hybrid OpenFlow networks are often conducted intuitively without in-depth technical considerations. In this paper, we discuss systematically the technical and architectural aspects of hybrid OpenFlow networks based on the experiences obtained so far in the development of our wide-area hybrid OpenFlow networks on JGN2plus/JGN-X, which is nation-wide network testbed in Japan. We also describe the design and operation of RISE (Research Infrastructure for large-Scale network Experiments) on JGN-X, whose objective is to support a variety of OpenFlow network experiments.