Rethinking Routers in the Age of Virtualization
Event details
| Date | 04.05.2009 |
| Hour | 07:00 |
| Speaker | Prof. Jennifer Rexford, Princeton University, USA |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
The traditional view of a router is as a networking device that computes routes and forwards packets from one link to another. Recent technical advances in virtualization enable a fresh rethinking of the relationship between router software and the underlying physical hardware. In this talk, we present two ways to capitalize on router virtualization to improve network reliability and simplify network management. First, we argue that many network-management problems stem from the difficulty of maintaining consistency between the physical and logical configuration of the routers. To address this problem, we propose VROOM (Virtual ROuters On the Move), a new network-management primitive that allows (virtual) routers to freely move from one physical node to another. In addition to simplifying existing network-management tasks like planned maintenance and service deployment, VROOM can also help tackle emerging challenges such as reducing energy consumption. Second, we argue that the complexity of router software leads to bugs that can have serious, network-wide consequences. To address this problem, we propose the design of a bug-tolerant router (BTR) that runs multiple diverse instances of routing software in parallel to detect faulty results before they impact data traffic or propagate to other routers. For both VROOM and BTR, we present the design and evaluation of prototype systems running on commodity platforms using unmodified open-source routing software.
Prof. Rexford's homepage
Practical information
- General public
- Free