@article {1655,
	title = {Gavel: A Fast and Easy-to-Use Plain Data Representation for Software-defined Networks},
	journal = {IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management},
	volume = {16},
	year = {2019},
	month = {03/2019},
	pages = {606-617},
	abstract = {<p>In Software-defined Networking (SDN), high-level abstractions typically offer a useful means to avoids writing network applications and policies on lower levels. However, abstractions are typically developed for a specific use case, which in turn results in an abundance of existing abstractions for different networking tasks. As a consequence orchestrating these abstractions to implement a common network policy becomes an arduous task. To address this challenge, plain data representations of the network and its control infrastructure have been proposed recently, which offer programmable ad-hoc abstractions to administrators. However, these frameworks suffer from quite complex programming requirements and impractical performance in terms of latency, as they are based on relational database engines. In this work, we address these shortcomings by introducing Gavel, an SDN controller that at its heart facilitates a plain data representation based on a graph database. By exploiting the native graph support of the database engine, Gavel significantly eases application and policy writing. Additionally, we show by experimental evaluation of several typical applications on multiple different topologies that Gavel offers significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art solutions.</p>
},
	keywords = {Controller, Database, Engines, Graph, Libraries, Programming, Relational databases, Software-defined Networks., Task analysis, Writing},
	issn = {1932-4537},
	doi = {10.1109/TNSM.2019.2903440},
	author = {Osamah. L. Barakat and David Koll and Xiaoming Fu}
}
@conference {1654,
	title = {Paving the Way towards Enterprise {SDN} Adoption: New Selection Strategies for Hybrid Networks},
	booktitle = {22nd Conference on Innovation in Clouds, Internet and Networks and Workshops (ICIN 2019)},
	year = {2019},
	month = {02/2019},
	publisher = {IEEE},
	organization = {IEEE},
	address = {Paris, France},
	abstract = {<p>Software Defined Networking (SDN) becomes more popular recently as an emerging computer networks paradigm, especially in data centers and WAN networks. In enterprise networks, however there are challenges from both technical and financial aspects in SDN adoption that needed to be tackled. Some proposals rely on upgrading the minimal set of switches to reach a full SDN control of the network, allowing incremental network upgrades. Nevertheless, existing proposals for switch selection either employ a basic selection strategy or use a heuristic that does not consider the whole network status, leading to upgrading more switches than needed which yields in more migration cost. In this paper, we present four different strategies for switch selection. We implemented and evaluated them against the state-of-the-art. Our results show that, the strategies that consider the whole network traffic status are able to achieve full SDN hybrid coverage with fewer SDN-enabled switches, saving up to 62\% compared to existing strategies.</p>
},
	keywords = {Controller, Hybrid, Software Defined Networking},
	author = {Osamah L. Barakat and Tayyebe Emadinia and David Koll and Xiaoming Fu}
}
