Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging network architecture that separates the network control and forwarding functions. By making network elements directly programmable, the underlying infrastructure can be more efficiently managed by a central controller to meet the tight requirements of today's applications and provide new network services. Such architecture paves the way to a plethora of online mechanisms to (re)configure instantaneously the network, thus tracking its evolution over time and exploiting the network capacity more efficiently than distributed routing protocols.
Looking at classical networking problems from this new perspective raises very challenging and novel online network optimization problems. These problems were not considered when network optimization was used for the planning phase with no hard computational time constraints. This talk gives an introduction to this new domain and presents a few contributions on fast connection setup and network re-optimization.

Stefano Paris is Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer and Mathematical Sciences of Paris Descartes University.

Further information is available at http://www.mi.parisdescartes.fr/~sparis03/biography.html