Modern SDN Stack

The SDN paradigm began with the development of the NOX controller and the OpenFlow forwarding specification. NOX's programming model was based on OpenFlow messages; each incoming OpenFlow message was a NOX event. Thus, "applications" (that is, control programs written on top of NOX) must deal with each of these OpenFlow messages. More

OpenRadio and Software Defined Cellular Wireless Networking

Mobile wireless networks today are faced with two conflicting trends. On the demand side, traffic is growing exponentially and becoming increasingly diverse. Several industry reports estimate that traffic will double approximately every nine months, leading to a several orders of magnitude increase in load over the next few years. More

Redesigning the Network Stack for Mobile Devices

Poor connectivity is common when using wireless networks on the go. Connectivity comes and goes, throughput varies, latencies can be extremely unpredictable, and failures are frequent. Industry reports that demand is growing faster than wireless capacity, and the wireless crunch will continue for some time to come. Yet users expect to run increasingly rich and demanding applications on their smart-phones, such as video streaming, anywhere-anytime access to their personal files, and online gaming; all of which depend on connectivity to the cloud over unpredictable wireless networks. More

OpenFlow Optimized Switch ASIC Design

The OpenFlow-enabled switches on the market today are built using switch chips designed for use in traditional networks. Those switch chips are not optimized for use in an OpenFlow environment, and most OpenFlow-enabled switches exhibit a number of shortcomings, e.g. matching on too few fields, a slow CPU interface, small flow tables, fixed-function parsing, and slow table updates. More

SDN for Home Networks

Broadband connectivity and a network inside the home are essential ingredients of a modern household. A large variety of home devices connect to the Internet, and high bandwidth Internet applications such as video and audio streaming, high quality video conferencing, file sharing and backup are now commonplace. More

Header Space Analysis

In the beginning, a switch or router was breathtakingly simple. About all the devices needed to do was index into a forwarding table using a destination address, and decide where to send the packet next. More

Load-Balancing as a Network Primitive

With the emergence of large web applications in the late 1990s, there was much interest in load-balancing to spread incoming requests across a set of identical web servers. More

Unified Control Architecture for Packet and Circuit Networks

Past attempts at unifying the control and management of packet-switched (IP) and circuit-switched (TDM/WDM) networks have been unsuccessful, mainly because such attempts have assumed that the control architecture of the networks cannot be changed. We believe that only architectural changes will enable true network convergence. More

An SDN Approach to MPLS Traffic Engineering and Virtual Private Networks

Most ISPs use MPLS to do traffic engineering and L2 and provide VPN services. ISPs require traffic engineering to use their network resources efficiently and VPNs have long been one of the most profitable service offerings. More