“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”. Boosting existing networks with Software-Defined Networking.

Event details
Date | 07.06.2016 |
Hour | 10:00 › 12:00 |
Speaker |
By Laurent Vanbever, ETH Zürich Biography Laurent Vanbever is an Assistant Professor at ETH Zürich where leads the Networked Systems Group (NSG) since January 2015. Before that, Laurent was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University where he collaborated with Professor Jennifer Rexford. He obtained his PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Louvain (Belgium) in October 2012. His research interests lie at the crossroads between theory and practice, with a focus on making large network infrastructures more manageable, scalable and secure. Laurent has won several awards for his research including: the USENIX NSDI 2016 community award; the ACM SIGCOMM 2015 best paper award; the ACM SIGCOMM Doctoral Dissertation Award (runner-up); the University of Louvain Best PhD Award; the ICNP 2013 best paper award; and three IETF/IRTF Applied Networking Research Prizes for his works on inter-domain routing and Software-Defined Networking (SDN). |
Location | |
Category | Conferences - Seminars |
Abstract
By centralizing and provisioning network decisions using a standardized API, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) holds great promises for improving the performance and manageability of network architectures. Getting there however requires a major software, hardware and even people overhaul. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to apply the SDN principles on top of existing network architectures, i.e. on good old IP routers, without having to change anything? It turned out that the answer is yes.
In this talk, I will describe two works we are pursuing in this area along with some prospective ones.
I will start by speaking about Fibbing, a hybrid SDN architecture that enables any IP router to be programmed---not configured---from a logically-centralized controller.
To achieve this, Fibbing uses distributed routing protocols as API. More specifically, a Fibbing controller tricks the routers into seeing an augmented network topology composed of fake nodes and fake links that is carefully crafted so that they compute the desired forwarding paths. The controller then injects these "lies" into the routing protocols, and the routers simply compute the paths accordingly. Fibbing is surprisingly expressive, scales to large networks, and quickly reacts to failures. We successfully tested our prototype on unmodified Cisco and Juniper routers.
Along with Fibbing, I will also talk about the SDX project in which we are currently improving Internet routing by deploying programmable devices in key locations on the Internet: the Internet Exchange Points (IXP). I will present
the many opportunities opened by the projects and how we managed to scale the platform to handle the load of the largest IXPs in the world.
By centralizing and provisioning network decisions using a standardized API, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) holds great promises for improving the performance and manageability of network architectures. Getting there however requires a major software, hardware and even people overhaul. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to apply the SDN principles on top of existing network architectures, i.e. on good old IP routers, without having to change anything? It turned out that the answer is yes.
In this talk, I will describe two works we are pursuing in this area along with some prospective ones.
I will start by speaking about Fibbing, a hybrid SDN architecture that enables any IP router to be programmed---not configured---from a logically-centralized controller.
To achieve this, Fibbing uses distributed routing protocols as API. More specifically, a Fibbing controller tricks the routers into seeing an augmented network topology composed of fake nodes and fake links that is carefully crafted so that they compute the desired forwarding paths. The controller then injects these "lies" into the routing protocols, and the routers simply compute the paths accordingly. Fibbing is surprisingly expressive, scales to large networks, and quickly reacts to failures. We successfully tested our prototype on unmodified Cisco and Juniper routers.
Along with Fibbing, I will also talk about the SDX project in which we are currently improving Internet routing by deploying programmable devices in key locations on the Internet: the Internet Exchange Points (IXP). I will present
the many opportunities opened by the projects and how we managed to scale the platform to handle the load of the largest IXPs in the world.
Practical information
- Informed public
- Free
- This event is internal
Organizer
- Willy Zwaenepoel
Contact
- Madeleine Robert