A performance study of network migration to SDN-enabled Traffic Engineering

In this paper, we analyze the question of network migration to Software Defined Networking (SDN) from the perspective of Traffic Engineering (TE). For a given network topology and migration planning horizon, we ask the question of which routers in the IP network should migrate to SDN-enabled operation to reduce the need for network capacity upgrades over a given time horizon. We propose an algorithm to determine the optimum schedule for node substitution within a network, which shows that already a few SDN routers, when strategically located, provide a stably large number of path alternatives to be used in TE, thus substantially reducing the need for large network capacity upgrades.