8. SDN-Based Network Resource Management

In recent years there has been a growing demand for network resources. However, fixed contracts between users and providers tend to result in network use inefficiencies and high costs. To promote the best accommodation for high network demand and usage, a setup where every user has the most amount of network resources at his disposal is paramount—this way users minimize the risk of not having sufficient resources to meet their service needs, and providers maximize the usage of their networks. In this chapter, we consider a setup based on Software Defined Networking (SDN), where connections between users’ devices and providers’ nodes are defined according to resource needs and pricing. The adoption of an SDN-based approach is detrimental of other more distributed control alternatives is since the scenario under investigation is very specific and dynamic, which is more efficiently managed in a logical centralized way than in a decentralized way. In this direction, an auction SDN-based broker is proposed, so that both users and providers get the best deal for every resource-allocation procedure, according to all players’ needs and network restrictions. We present and discuss evaluation results taken from our auction business model. Our results suggest that the best bidding strategy depends on several aspects, namely: (i) the competitor’s bidding strategy; (ii) the operating cost of each participant; or (iii) the available resources of all participants and the broker’s requisites.