Recent technological advances have determined the emergence of several limitations that the traditional networks have. This situation lead the networking industry to rethink network architectures in order to solve these issues. This paper presents a short overview and history of the new paradigm that appeared in this context, Software Defined Networking (SDN). First of all, this concept is briefly presented. After that, the ideas that form the fundaments of SDN are introduced. They appeared from previous research in the industry: active networks, data and control planes separation and OpenFlow protocol. Afterwards, the motivation behind SDN is exposed by displaying the limitations that traditional networks have and the concepts that promote this new paradigm. Next, we present a few details about the SDN paradigm and some techno-economic aspects. The paper concludes with future research directions, which are related to the definition of use cases for Wireless & Mobile applications and possibly development and even implementation of SDN applications that optimize the wireless networks.
