The IESG has approved the following document: - 'Software-Defined Networking: A Perspective From Within A Service Provider' (draft-sin-sdnrg-sdn-approach-09.txt) as Informational RFC This document has been reviewed in the IETF but is not the product of an IETF Working Group. The IESG contact person is Adrian Farrel. A URL of this Internet Draft is: http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-sin-sdnrg-sdn-approach/ Technical Summary Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has been one of the major buzz words of the networking industry for the past couple of years. And yet, no clear definition of what SDN actually covers has been broadly admitted so far. This document aims at contributing to the clarification of the SDN landscape by providing a perspective on requirements, issues and other considerations about SDN, as seen from within a service provider environment. It is not meant to endlessly discuss what SDN truly means, but rather to suggest a functional taxonomy of the techniques that can be used under a SDN umbrella and to elaborate on the various pending issues the combined activation of such techniques inevitably raises. As such, a definition of SDN is only mentioned for the sake of clarification. Working Group Summary This is an individual submission not the product of a working group. The document was discussed within the SDNRG of the IRTF from where useful feedback was gathered. One of the chairs of the SDNRG and the chair of the IRTF have both confirmed that they are OK with progressing this as an individual submission. Doing that has led to IETF last call which generated some additional feedback. Care has been taken to word the document such that it can gain IETF consensus for its content rather than just being the authors' viewpoint. Document Quality This is an Informational I-D and not the subject of anything that can be directly implemented. The sponsoring AD reviewed the document and gave a number of comments that led to updates. Personnel Adrian Farrel (Adrian@olddog.co.uk) is the Document Shepherd and Responsible Area Director.
