| NSF Org: |
CNS Division Of Computer and Network Systems |
| Recipient: |
|
| Initial Amendment Date: | March 18, 2015 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | March 18, 2015 |
| Award Number: | 1539920 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Darleen Fisher
CNS Division Of Computer and Network Systems CSE Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering |
| Start Date: | January 16, 2015 |
| End Date: | September 30, 2018 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $500,000.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $500,000.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
|
| History of Investigator: |
|
| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
1 NASSAU HALL PRINCETON NJ US 08544-2001 (609)258-3090 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
|
| Primary Place of Performance: |
Princeton NJ US 08540-5233 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
|
| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
|
| Parent UEI: |
|
| NSF Program(s): | Networking Technology and Syst |
| Primary Program Source: |
|
| Program Reference Code(s): |
|
| Program Element Code(s): |
|
| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.070 |
ABSTRACT
The Border Gateway Protocol(BGP) is the protocol used to administer and control the flow of traffic between the separately administered networks that connect together to form the Internet. Because many of the current failings of the Internet are due to BGP's poor performance and limited functionality, this project aims to explore incrementally deployable ways to leverage Software-Defined Networking's (SDN) power to improve interdomain routing. These improvements will facilitate higher return on investment via load balancing and traffic engineering, increased capabilities to respond to denial-of-service attacks, and new services such as application specific peering where two networks exchange traffic only for certain applications (e.g., video). Additionally, the project will improved the ability of network operators to track and engineer peering relationships based on traffic volume.
This project exploits the re-emergence of Internet eXchange Points (IXPs) to create Software Defined eXchanges (SDXs) that fundamentally change network control. The project has two major themes: (1) near-term solutions that coexist with BGP; and (2) long-term solutions that replace BGP entirely, using IXPs as the dominant mode of interconnection. In terms of near-term solutions, the central intellectual question explores the improvements that are possible when a single IXP deploys SDN-based technology. Longer term, assuming that SDXes will one day become more prominent, the project is developing solutions that replace BGP entirely with an SDX-mediated Internet, where all peering takes place at these interconnection points. Such a design would make policy only relevant to the endpoints (the sending and receiving domains) and would eliminate policy complications from intermediate providers. The project is also investigating how these endpoint policies might emerge, how the inter-SDX routing is done, how the longer-term design might be incrementally deployed, and what its impact might be in the provider ecosystem. The SDX design may point the way to a more stable, secure, and economically sound Internet.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
Note:
When clicking on a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number, you will be taken to an external
site maintained by the publisher. Some full text articles may not yet be available without a
charge during the embargo (administrative interval).
Some links on this page may take you to non-federal websites. Their policies may differ from
this site.
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.
The main outcome of this effort was an SDX prototype. Software-Defined Internet Exchange Points (SDXes) promise to significantly increase the flexibility and function of interdomain traffic delivery on the Internet. Unfortunately, previous SDX designs (including our initial design) could not achieve the scale required for large Internet exchange points (IXPs), which can host hundreds of participants exchanging traffic for hundreds of thousands of prefixes. Existing platforms are indeed too slow and inefficient to operate at this scale, typically requiring minutes to compile policies and millions of forwarding rules in the data plane. We therefore produced iSDX, an SDX architecture that can operate at the scale of the largest IXPs. iSDX reduces both policy compilation time and forwarding table size by two orders of magnitude compared to current state-of-the-art SDX controllers. Our paper on iSDX appeared at the March 2016 USENIX Networked Systems Design and Implementation conference, where it won the Community Award. The iSDX source code also ships with CloudRouter and is a popular open-source project at the Open-Source SDN site. After the source code release, we partnered with the Open Network Foundation to release iSDX under the Open Source SDN “umbrella project”, to give the project more visibility and connection to the community. We advertised this release to ONF participants, as well as on the widely read CircleID network operators blog. Working with two programmers at Applied Communication Sciences (ACS), we substantially hardened the software to ready it for a real deployment. Various agencies are currently evaluating this code for possible deployment.
In addition, throughout this project, we have developed various related technologies, including techniques to build scalable VPN gateways, concisely encode and query sequences in packet headers, preserve policy-privacy at SDXs, and simplify SDN control planes.
Last Modified: 01/02/2019
Modified by: Nicholas G Feamster
Please report errors in award information by writing to: awardsearch@nsf.gov.
