| NSF Org: |
CNS Division Of Computer and Network Systems |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | February 1, 2011 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | September 5, 2014 |
| Award Number: | 1054985 |
| Award Instrument: | Continuing Grant |
| Program Manager: |
John Brassil
CNS Division Of Computer and Network Systems CSE Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering |
| Start Date: | July 1, 2011 |
| End Date: | June 30, 2017 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $400,461.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $400,461.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2012 = $120,610.00 FY 2013 = $66,700.00 FY 2014 = $137,642.00 |
| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
13 OAK DR HAMILTON NY US 13346-1386 (315)228-7457 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
13 OAK DR HAMILTON NY US 13346-1386 |
| 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: |
01001213DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001314DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001415DB 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
The inability to change core functionality beyond a simple packet forwarding service has hindered innovation in the Internet. Although the architectural simplicity of the Internet has likely led to its massive success, it has also had unintended consequences. For example, there is little intrinsic support to measure and monitor the Internet, which makes effective management challenging and has confounded efforts to gain a deep understanding of the Internet's structure and behavior. In addition, real-time applications often rely on overlay networks and application-level optimizations to deliver acceptable performance to users. Moreover, various network security devices are deployed as extrinsic, isolated systems to detect and respond to attacks; methods to detect and react to security threats could be much more effective if there were coordinated detection and response mechanisms integral to the Internet.
Intellectual Merit: This project develops a new approach for enhancing the functionality of Internet routers, toward the goal of enabling the development of future applications and services. The aim of the research is to provide programmable mechanisms on routers and similar Internet devices to enable service providers, application developers, and researchers to harness in-network capabilities. A new framework for programming network routers will be developed based on primitive functions that enable and expose new and useful capabilities in the Internet. These primitives will be designed to provide in-network support for measurement and monitoring of the Internet, real-time applications, and network security.
Broader Impact: A reference design and implementation of the programming framework will be made openly available to researchers and deployed and evaluated in the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) experimental network. In this setting, researchers will be able to use it to test research ideas that require or could benefit from additional in-network capabilities. In addition, tutorials will be held to introduce researchers to the system. Undergraduate students will participate in the research activities of this project. Moreover, new course materials will be developed and tailored to undergraduates at smaller institutions. Two sets of coursework will be developed: one for use with a popular reconfigurable hardware system (the NetFPGA) and another for use with the router programming framework to be developed. The educational materials will be made openly available to other undergraduate institutions and workshops will be held to disseminate the materials to the educational community.
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.
The intellectual merits of this project have been as follows. We created a framework for expanding programmability of routers, including a language (Morpheme) and runtime environment. We demonstrated the feasibility and flexibility of our approach through experiments. We created a new simulation-based environment for testing, debugging, and evaluating software-defined networking control programs, specifically those that use the Openflow protocol. A key feature of the environment is that it can interoperate with any controller environment, regardless of implementation language or runtime requirements. Our testing and debugging environment exhibits improved scalability and speed over the prevailing system in use, Mininet. Network measurement and analysis work carried out as part of this project have provided deeper insight into the operation of MPLS within the Internet, differences in performance characteristics of cellular, WiFi, and broadband operators, end-to-end network delays, and the physical fiber-optic infrastructure that makes up the Internet in the United States. Additionally, a new framework for monetizing and making use of currently unused fiber-optic links to improve network performance and resilience, on demand, was developed through this project.
The broader impacts of this work have been as follows. Ten undergraduate students were directly involved in the research activities of this project, including three women and eight students from underrepresented groups. Summer workshops were held for underprivileged high school students in central New York as part of a "science camp" held at Colgate University, which introduced students to computer science and basic ideas of network measurement. A new framework for computer networking education was created, called Switchyard, along with extensive instructor resources. Switchyard was used 5 times at two different institutions.
Last Modified: 08/09/2017
Modified by: Joel E Sommers
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