Mininet is a system for rapidly prototyping large networks on the constrained resources of a single laptop The lightweight approach of using OS-level virtualization features, including processes and network namespaces, allows it to scale to hundreds of nodes Experiences with our initial implementation suggest that the ability to run, poke, and debug in real time represents a qualitative change in workflow We share supporting case studies culled from over 100 users, at 18 institutions, who have developed Software-Defined Networks (SDN) Ultimately, we think the greatest value of Mininet will be supporting collaborative network research, by enabling self-contained SDN prototypes which anyone with a PC can download, run, evaluate, explore, tweak, and build upon

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A network in a laptop: rapid prototyping for software-defined networks

OpenFlow is a great concept, but its original design imposes excessive overheads. It can simplify network and traffic management in enterprise and data center environments, because it enables flow-level control over Ethernet switching and provides global visibility of the flows in the network. However, such fine-grained control and visibility comes with costs: the switch-implementation costs of involving the switch's control-plane too often and the distributed-system costs of involving the OpenFlow controller too frequently, both on flow setups and especially for statistics-gathering.In this paper, we analyze these overheads, and show that OpenFlow's current design cannot meet the needs of high-performance networks. We design and evaluate DevoFlow, a modification of the OpenFlow model which gently breaks the coupling between control and global visibility, in a way that maintains a useful amount of visibility without imposing unnecessary costs. We evaluate DevoFlow through simulations, and find that it can load-balance data center traffic as well as fine-grained solutions, without as much overhead: DevoFlow uses 10--53 times fewer flow table entries at an average switch, and uses 10--42 times fewer control messages.

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DevoFlow: scaling flow management for high-performance networks

Network management is challenging. To operate, maintain, and secure a communication network, network operators must grapple with low-level vendor-specific configuration to implement complex high-level network policies. Despite many previous proposals to make networks easier to manage, many solutions to network management problems amount to stop-gap solutions because of the difficulty of changing the underlying infrastructure. The rigidity of the underlying infrastructure presents few possibilities for innovation or improvement, since network devices have generally been closed, proprietary, and vertically integrated. A new paradigm in networking, software defined networking (SDN), advocates separating the data plane and the control plane, making network switches in the data plane simple packet forwarding devices and leaving a logically centralized software program to control the behavior of the entire network. SDN introduces new possibilities for network management and configuration methods. In this article, we identify problems with the current state-of-the-art network configuration and management mechanisms and introduce mechanisms to improve various aspects of network management. We focus on three problems in network management: enabling frequent changes to network conditions and state, providing support for network configuration in a highlevel language, and providing better visibility and control over tasks for performing network diagnosis and troubleshooting. The technologies we describe enable network operators to implement a wide range of network policies in a high-level policy language and easily determine sources of performance problems. In addition to the systems themselves, we describe various prototype deployments in campus and home networks that demonstrate how SDN can improve common network management tasks.

Improving network management with software defined networking

A global center for commercial innovation, PARC, a Xerox company, works closely with enterprises, entrepreneurs, government program partners and other clients to discover, develop, and deliver new business opportunities. PARC was incorporated in 2002 as a wholly owned subsidiary of Xerox Corporation (NYSE: XRX).

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Named Data Networking (NDN) Project

We describe the design and implementation of Open vSwitch, a multi-layer, open source virtual switch for all major hypervisor platforms. Open vSwitch was designed de novo for networking in virtual environments, resulting in major design departures from traditional software switching architectures. We detail the advanced flow classification and caching techniques that Open vSwitch uses to optimize its operations and conserve hypervisor resources. We evaluate Open vSwitch performance, drawing from our deployment experiences over the past seven years of using and improving Open vSwitch.

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The design and implementation of open vSwitch

This paper presents AIP (Accountable Internet Protocol), a network architecture that provides accountability as a first-order property. AIP uses a hierarchy of self-certifying addresses, in which each component is derived from the public key of the corresponding entity. We discuss how AIP enables simple solutions to source spoofing, denial-of-service, route hijacking, and route forgery. We also discuss how AIP's design meets the challenges of scaling, key management, and traffic engineering.

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Accountable internet protocol (aip)

For routers and switches to handle ever-increasing bandwidth requirements, the packet “fast-path” must be handled with specialized hardware. There have been two approaches to building such packet forwarding hardware. The first is to embed particular algorithms in hardware; this is what most commodity forwarding chips do (e.g., those from Broadcom, Marvell, and Fulcrum). These chips have led to amazing increases in performance and reductions in cost; for instance, one can now get 24 ports of gigabit ethernet for under $1000. Unfortunately, this approach offers only very rigid functionality; one can’t change protocols or add new features that require hardware acceleration without redoing the chip. This forces network forwarding enhancements to evolve on hardware design timescales, which are glacially slow compared to the rate at which network applications and requirements are changing. To counter this inflexibility, several vendors have taken a different approach by introducing more flexible “network processors”. These have not been as successful as anticipated, for at least two reasons. First, designers were never able to find a sweet-spot in the tradeoff between hardware simplicity and flexible functionality, so the performance/price ratios have lagged well behind commodity networking chips. For another, the interface provided to software has proven hard to use, requiring protocol implementors to painstakingly contort their code to the idiosyncrasies of the particular underlying hardware to achieve reasonable performance. These two problems (among others) have prevented general-purpose network processors from dislodging the more narrowly targeted commodity packet forwarding hardware that dominates the market today. In this paper, we step back from these two well-known approaches and ask more fundamentally: what would we want from packet forwarding hardware, how might we achieve it, and what burden does that place on networking software? Ideally, hardware implementations of the forwarding paths should have the following properties:

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Rethinking Packet Forwarding Hardware.

An overall sensornet architecture would help tame the increasingly complex structure of wireless sensornet software and help foster greater interoperability between different codebases A previous step in this direction is the Sensornet Protocol (SP), a unifying link-abstraction layer This paper takes the natural next step by proposing a modular network-layer for sensornets that sits atop SP This modularity eases implementation of new protocols by increasing code reuse, and enables co-existing protocols to share and reduce code and resources consumed at run-time We demonstrate how current protocols can be decomposed into this modular structure and show that the costs, in performance and code footprint, are minimal relative to their monolithic counterparts

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A modular network layer for sensorsets

In this demo, we present Ripcord, a modular platform for rapidly prototyping scale-out data center networks. Ripcord enables researchers to build and evaluate new network features and topologies, using only commercially available hardware and open-source software. The Ripcord demo will show three examples of custom network functions, operating together, on top of a 160-node cluster. The first is a routing engine that isolates classes of traffic. The second is a dynamic network manager than adjusts links and switch power states to reduce energy. The third is a statistics aggregator that supports network health monitoring and automatic alerts. The demo will be interactive, with a visualization of live parameters for each link and switch, such as bandwidth, drops, and power status, as well a control panel to modify the traffic load. We feel that an interactive demo is the best way to introduce the research community to Ripcord and get their feedback.

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Ripcord: a modular platform for data center networking

Today’s IP network layer provides little to no protection against misconfiguration or malice. Despite some progress in improving the robustness and security of the IP layer, misconfigurations and attacks still occur frequently. We show how a network layer that provides accountability, i.e., the ability to associate each action with the responsible entity, provides a firm foundation for defenses against misconfiguration and malice. We present the design of a network layer that incorporates accountability called AIP (Accountable Internet Protocol) and show how its features—notably, its use of self-certifying addresses— can improve both source accountability (the ability to trace actions to a particular end host and stop that host from misbehaving) and control-plane accountability (the ability to pinpoint and prevent attacks on routing).

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Daekyeong Moon

Papers

Accountable internet protocol (aip)

Rethinking Packet Forwarding Hardware.

A modular network layer for sensorsets

Ripcord: a modular platform for data center networking

Holding the Internet Accountable