In addition to the configuration complexities, handling network dynamics and automation is also missing to provide event based triggering of necessary actions. As the network grows, the number of policies defined on the application layer also grows rapidly, and it becomes extremely difficult to manage. To make changes in the networking layer is almost an impossible task. This makes the traditional network stagnant and ossified (Chowdhury & Boutaba, 2009) and therefore, the need for a general management paradigm increases, in order to provide common management abstractions that hides the details of the physical infrastructure, and enables flexible network management. Software Defined Networks (SDN) vs. Traditional Networks Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has the potential to reduce many of these traditional network problems because of its support to dynamic nature of network, centralized control plane and direct programmability. As given by the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) SDN is the physical separation of the network control plane from the forwarding plane, and where the control plane controls devices, i.e., the control and data planes are decoupled, network intelligence and state are logically centralized in the SDN architecture and the underlying network infrastructure is abstracted from the applications. (ONF White Paper (2012)) Figure 1 shows the difference between the traditional network and SDN networks. The traditional network carries a distributed control whereas the software defined network contains the centralized network. According to Nunes, Mendonca, Nguyen, Obraczka, Turletti, (2014), the SDN architecture decouples control logic from the forwarding hardware, and enables the consolidation of middle boxes, simpler policy management, and new functionalities. The solid lines define the data-plane links and the dashed lines the control-plane links. Downloaded: 4/15/2022 9:44:49 AM Nova Southeastern University IP Address: 137.52.76.29 Introduction to SDN and NFV Figure 1. Traditional Networks vs SDN 