| NSF Org: |
CNS Division Of Computer and Network Systems |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | August 20, 2013 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | July 15, 2019 |
| Award Number: | 1302041 |
| Award Instrument: | Continuing Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Darleen Fisher
CNS Division Of Computer and Network Systems CSE Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering |
| Start Date: | September 1, 2013 |
| End Date: | August 31, 2020 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $499,999.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $499,999.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2014 = $104,531.00 FY 2015 = $144,877.00 FY 2016 = $149,017.00 |
| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
21 N PARK ST STE 6301 MADISON WI US 53715-1218 (608)262-3822 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
WI US 53706-1685 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | Networking Technology and Syst |
| Primary Program Source: |
01001415DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001516DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001617DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.070 |
ABSTRACT
Enterprises rely on specialized network appliances or middleboxes such as load balancers, intrusion detection and prevention systems, and WAN optimizers in order to meet critical performance optimization, security, and policy compliance requirements. With the advent of cloud computing, such middlebox processing will play an increasingly critical role in cloud deployments due to two key factors: 1) As enterprises move their IT infrastructure to the cloud, they want to leverage the same performance and security benefits for applications running in the cloud; and 2) Enterprises want to reduce their infrastructure and management costs by offloading middlebox functionality to cloud providers to leverage the elastic scaling and migration benefits offered by cloud computing.
Unfortunately, cloud customers and providers today lack the necessary abstractions and mechanisms for enabling this transition. At a high-level, the problem is that these workloads are drastically different from traditional computation and storage services for which cloud computing has been extremely successful. This raises fundamental challenges along several dimensions: the need for flexible composition or chaining of network services; the increased impact of network-level performance on such workloads; the inherent difficulty in identifying bottlenecked resources in multiplexed cloud deployments; and the inability to reason about correct and consistent operation of stateful network processing in dynamic deployment scenarios.
This project will bridge this disconnect by addressing foundational issues in the design and implementation of (1) policy frameworks, elastic scaling algorithms, and software-defined controllers for enterprise administrators to translate their requirements into an actual physical realization; (2) algorithms for intelligent network-level placement, traffic engineering, and topology design for cloud providers to support such workloads; and (3) new abstractions for managing and manipulating the middlebox-associated state of the network.
Broader Impact: This work will inform the critical industry evolution as enterprises and cloud providers are attempting to realize the benefits of 'network virtualization'. Furthermore, the project will enable new dimensions of flexibility for network deployments that do not exist today---democratizing the benefits of middleboxes to small businesses; providing the ability to elastically scale network-level services to meet application demands; and enabling live migration of entire enterprise deployments across physical infrastructures. The project will generate new course materials on software-defined networking and cloud computing and tightly integrate research with education to help students become experts in these emerging domains. The software tools and benchmark measurement data produced by the research will inform the industry transition and future academic work on such middleboxes-in-the-cloud deployments. Finally, while the project focuses on middleboxes in cloud deployments, the technical foundations developed therein will apply to traditional enterprise and ISP networks as well.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
Network functions virtualization (NFV) enables crucial network functionality pertaining to security, performance and availability to be run in software appliances as opposed to dedicated hardware. NFV vastly improves network management., allowing network operators and engineers to implement rich security and access control policies. Operators can overcome network functoin (NF) failure and performance issues by spinning up additional instances, and dynamically redistributing traffic across the scaled up instances.
While this topic has received significant attention, much less work has focussed on how to achieve correct operation at network function. In this project, the PIs showed that network functions core design -- wherein they manipulate detailed state on a per packet basis -- imposes key difficult in correct executing them under dynamic conditions.
The project identified correct network function state management as a fundamental component to effective realization of NFV technologies. The project thus developed novel frameworks for move and copying network function state, formal approaches for verifying the validity of state operations, and realizing massively scalable network functions deployments. The project led to many fundamental breakthroughs on network functions virtualization technologies that have been widely adopted and built upon in both research and the industry.
The project has had a substantial broader impact component. Results from this project have been tightly integrated into graduate and undergraduate courses. The project has lead to the theses of 9 students. The principal investigators worked closely with high school students and students from under-represented minorities over the course of the project. Results from the project are currently undergoing standardization efforts.
Last Modified: 01/31/2021
Modified by: Aditya A Akella
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