DICES: A dynamic adaptive service-driven SDN architecture

The SDNs promise is to provide flexibility, programmability and scalability, while reducing the infrastructure costs to Networks Operators (NO) by centralizing and softwarizing the control plane. Nonetheless, this centralization process goes against the distribution of the control that prevailed, until now, in telecommunication networks. Despite the hopes it raises, it brings new issues mainly related to the scalability and the reliability of this kind of architectures. Drawing on SDN´s concepts, this paper´s purpose is to build an innovative network architecture that is: programmable, flexible, scalable and aware of the services´ SLA. To achieve this goal, we proposed a new architecture called DICES, which includes several concepts. Firstly, a basic controller is integrated as a generic function on the highest layer of all the network elements. Secondly, the controllers instances are activated and deployed thanks to a network orchestrator entity according to the requested SLA. Thirdly, the network services are composed and modeled using Petri nets, and validated before their deployment and execution on the controller level.