Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has the potential to automate and radically simplify management of computer networks—today a manual, error-prone task. Many networks however, especially enterprise networks, face a deployment problem: How to migrate an existing network to SDN? SDN must be introduced incrementally to build confidence and respect infrastructure budget constraints. In this article, we present an approach to design and operate hybrid networks that combine both traditional and SDN switches. Our architecture, called Panopticon, exposes an abstraction of a logical SDN programming interface for incrementally deployable software-defined networks, where SDN benefits can extend over the entire network. Based on network simulation and emulation experiments, we find that the SDN capabilities can be realized even when the SDN deployment covers a small fraction of the entire network.

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