“Think of it as a general language or an instruction set that lets me write a control program for the network rather than having to rewrite all of code on each individual router,” -Scott Shenker, a Berkley
DEAN abstracts the controller specific view of the network and provide an global view, and unified services. DEAN belongs to the control plan of standard SDN ecosystem DEAN is not a controller DEAN is a Unified API provider for different Controller DEAN abstracts the controller details from the user/App. DEAN doesn’t deal with network elements, but Controllers DEAN’s goal is provide better and easier API for Network Programming DEAN currently supports OpenDayLight, FloodLight and ONOS
DEAN plugins are needed to be implemented in some of the Controller depending on the Feature criteria.