Abstract

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has received a great deal of attention from both academia and industry in recent years. Studies on SDN have brought a number of interesting technical discussions on network architecture design, along with scientific contributions. Researchers, network operators, and vendors are trying to establish new standards and provide guidelines for proper implementation and deployment of such novel approach. It is clear that many of these research efforts have been made in the southbound of the SDN architecture, while the northbound interface still needs improvements. By focusing in the SDN northbound, this paper surveys the body of knowledge and discusses the challenges for developing SDN software. We investigate the existing solutions and identify trends and challenges on programming for SDN environments. We also discuss future developments on techniques, specifications, and methodologies for programmable networks, with the orthogonal view from the Software Engineering discipline.