I had heard of Software Defined Radio: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radio through Amateur Radio (Ham Radio) where I am an Advanced Class licensee … but had not heard of Software Defined Network until seeing:
SDN: Your Next Network on Information Week @ http://www.informationweek.com/infrastructure/switches/sdn-your-next-network/240008034?ct=1022
Software Defined Radio is where … well here is what it says (briefly) on Wikipedia:
A software-defined radio system, or SDR, is a radio communication system where components that have been typically implemented in hardware (e.g. mixers, filters, amplifiers, modulators/demodulators, detectors, etc.) are instead implemented by means of software on a personal computer or embedded system
* I have seen SDR (Radio) in several uses … including commercial radios that are programmable by software as to their capabilities and frequencies that they can operate on (even one’s that can do the Radio part of a Cellular GSM system) – but mainly in Soft Rock type SDR systems online allowing a visitor to tune the Ham Bands and listen to H.F. radio without owning a SSB radio. Also different digital modes are done these days, such as Radio Teletype, which used to require specific large hardware to implement. RTTY and other digital modes can be processed these days with a common computer sound card and software on a Windows PC.
* But SDN – Software Defined Network … I had not heard of that. I had heard of Network Flows and such on Cisco Routers … but not looking into (yet) what is OpenFlow and such.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Defined_Networking - says …
Software defined networking (SDN) is an emerging architecture for computer networking. SDN separates the control plane from the data plane in network switches and routers. Under SDN, the control plane is implemented in software in servers separate from the network equipment and the data plane is implemented in commodity network equipment. OpenFlow is a leading SDN architecture.
https://www.opennetworking.org/ - is the home of the OpenFlow specification.
I saw an interesting video on this on http://www.technologyreview.com/article/412194/tr10-software-defined-networking/ – Stanford computer scientist Nick McKeown and colleagues developed a standard called OpenFlow that essentially opens up the Internet to researchers, allowing them to define data flows using software–a sort of “software-defined networking.”
I don’t find that video on Youtube.com … bu there is another one more recent from last year
How SDN will Shape Networking - Nick McKeown
Open Networking Summit 2011
Premier Event for OpenFlow and Software Defined Networking
Stanford October 18-19, 2011
* I don't think SDN or OpenFlow is going to affect us much yet on the typical sail or motor yacht platform, but we might start seeing that capability built-in to newer network switches and on sometime in the future on some of the Internet Connection Control Systems that we deal with. When you get to the campus sized network with multiple buildings and facilities ... or larger networks managed by cellular networks and such ... this kind of thing becomes quite interesting.
* You can download and run Mininet as mentioned in the video, here: http://yuba.stanford.edu/foswiki/bin/view/OpenFlow/MininetGettingStarted
(P.S. It helps to know a little how to do things in Linux - but they do give good instructions in Getting Started and other pages mentioned. I got the VM running but couldn't get to it from another Ubuntu VM I had already. I had to change the Vmware Network settings for their VM and put it bridged to my actual network like my VM was. I could also put them both on a private VMware network ... but I use my Ubuntu for other things as well and I didn't want to break Internet Access for it.)
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Alan Spicer Marine Telecom
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