A Research Agenda for Benchmarking the Resilience of Software Defined Networks

Software Defined Networking (SDN) has recently emerged as a hot topic deserving strong interest both from academia and industry. The change it advises of logically centralizing the overall network control on software platforms and applications, turns networks more and more into software-based systems. Such paradigm shift enables to build more manageable, agile and smarter data communication infrastructures. Despite the interest it is deserving on a multitude of physical and virtualized infrastructures, currently there are no systematic approaches of characterizing and comparing alternative SDN-based solutions regarding their resilience -- a characteristic of utmost importance on such critical environments. In this paper we present a tentative path to bridge this gap, by proposing a research agenda to advance resilience benchmarks for SDNs. We believe that with such class of tools and methodologies, researchers, developers and practitioners will become in a better position to advance the area and take more informed decisions.