Cisco – how do we view Switches and Routers in SDN networking

ciscorouterroutingsdnswitch

Speaking of Software-Defined Networking, when it is said SDN switches or SDN routers, does it imply the "physical" routers and switches? If not, does it then imply that SDN controller emulates the routers inside its operating system including the routing tables too?

Best Answer

OpenFlow specifically - but also generally applicable to all of SDN - doesn't change anything about how your physical device forwards packets. The hardware is the same, and the pipeline that already existed on that device is unchanged.

What OpenFlow does is move the logic for programming the packet matches and actions from on the device itself (the local firmware), to a process that is running on a different device, which may have a view of more than one network element (and thus may be able to make better decisions with a better view of the world - or not). So, while you may configure network routing at a single controller, the controller is then distributing that information to a lot of devices to do what they have always done - match, modify, and forward packets.