OpenDaylight was designed to be a broad, general-purpose platform to support a wide range of use cases–including ones that haven’t been invented yet. ODL delivers the benefits of SDN and NFV to carriers, enterprises, research institutions, and other organizations such as cities and metropolitan areas. Some of the most common applications of OpenDaylight technology are described below.

Automated Service Delivery: Providing on-demand services that may be controlled by the end user or the service provider. Examples include bandwidth scheduling (either calendared or on-demand) or dynamic VPN services.

Cloud and NFV: Agile service delivery on cloud infrastructure in either the enterprise or service provider environment. The underlay will frequently be OpenStack, and services may be implemented using Network Functions Virtualization (NFV).

Network Resources Optimization (NRO): Dynamically optimizing the network based on load and state. This is the most common carrier use case as it optimizes the network using the near-real-time state of traffic, topology and equipment. NRO uses a variety of southbound protocols (for example, NETCONF, BGP-LS or OpenFlow) depending on the underlying network. In addition to being used “under the covers” by many telcos and cable operators, this is a top use case for enterprise and financial institutions.

Visibility and Control: Centralized administration of the network and/or multiple controllers. This is sometimes used by carriers or enterprises as a precursor to NRO.