Design and test of a software defined hybrid network architecture

Circuit and packet switching convergence offers significant advantages in core networks to exploit their complementary characteristics in terms of flexibility, scalability and quality of service. This paper considers the possibility of unifying the two different types of transport using the Software Defined Networking (SDN) approach. The proposed architecture applies a modular design to the whole set of node functions, representing the key enabler for a fully programmable network implementation. This paper also proposes a possible extension to the basic concept of flow defined by the current OpenFlow standard to properly support a hybrid network. A set of experiments are performed to assess the main functionality and the performance of the hybrid node where packet and circuit switching are assumed to be configured through the OpenFlow protocol in a fully automated way.