Artificial Intelligence Enabled Software Defined Networking: A Comprehensive Overview
This is an incremental review that synthesizes existing research for networking and AI communities.
This paper provides a comprehensive overview of how artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, including machine learning, meta-heuristics, and fuzzy inference systems, are being integrated into software defined networking (SDN) to enhance learning abilities and decision-making.
Software defined networking (SDN) represents a promising networking architecture that combines central management and network programmability. SDN separates the control plane from the data plane and moves the network management to a central point, called the controller, that can be programmed and used as the brain of the network. Recently, the research community has showed an increased tendency to benefit from the recent advancements in the artificial intelligence (AI) field to provide learning abilities and better decision making in SDN. In this study, we provide a detailed overview of the recent efforts to include AI in SDN. Our study showed that the research efforts focused on three main sub-fields of AI namely: machine learning, meta-heuristics and fuzzy inference systems. Accordingly, in this work we investigate their different application areas and potential use, as well as the improvements achieved by including AI-based techniques in the SDN paradigm.