Supporting novel home network management interfaces with Openflow and NOX

The Homework project has examined redesign of existing home network infrastructures to better support the needs and requirements of actual home users. Integrating results from several ethnographic studies, we have designed and built a home networking platform providing detailed per-flow measurement and management capabilities supporting several novel management interfaces. This demo specifically shows these new visualization and control interfaces, and describes the broader benefits of taking an integrated view of the networking infrastructure, realised through our router's augmented measurement and control APIs. Aspects of this work have been published: the Homework Database in Internet Management (IM) 2011 and implications of the ethnographic results are to appear at the SIGCOMM W-MUST workshop 2011. Separate, more detailed expositions of the interface elements and system performance and implications are currently under submission at other venues. A partial code release is already available and we anticipate fuller public beta release by Q4 2011

Supporting novel home network management interfaces with Openflow and NOX

The Homework project has examined redesign of existing home network infrastructures to better support the needs and requirements of actual home users. Integrating results from several ethnographic studies, we have designed and built a home networking platform providing detailed per-flow measurement and management capabilities supporting several novel management interfaces. This demo specifically shows these new visualization and control interfaces, and describes the broader benefits of taking an integrated view of the networking infrastructure, realised through our router's augmented measurement and control APIs. Aspects of this work have been published: the Homework Database in Internet Management (IM) 2011 and implications of the ethnographic results are to appear at the SIGCOMM W-MUST workshop 2011. Separate, more detailed expositions of the interface elements and system performance and implications are currently under submission at other venues. A partial code release is already available and we anticipate fuller public beta release by Q4 2011

Can open-source projects (re-) shape the SDN/NFV-driven telecommunication market?

Telecom network operators face rapidly changing business needs. Due to their dependence on long product cycles they lack the ability to quickly respond to changing user demands. To spur innovation and stay competitive, network operators are investigating technological solutions with a proven track record in other application domains such as open source software projects. Open source software enables parties to learn, use, or contribute to technology from which they were previously excluded. OSS has reshaped many application areas including the landscape of operating systems and consumer software. The paradigmshift in telecommunication systems towards Software-Defined Networking introduces possibilities to benefit from open source projects. Implementing the control part of networks in software enables speedier adaption and innovation, and less dependencies on legacy protocols or algorithms hard-coded in the control part of network devices. The recently proposed concept of Network Function Virtualization pushes the softwarization of telecommunication functionalities even further down to the data plane. Within the NFV paradigm, functionality which was previously reserved for dedicated hardware implementations can now be implemented in software and deployed on generic Commercial Off-The Shelf (COTS) hardware. This paper provides an overview of existing open source initiatives for SDN/NFV-based network architectures, involving infrastructure to orchestration-related functionality. It situates them in a business process context and identifies the pros and cons for the market in general, as well as for individual actors

An architecture for dynamic QoS management at Layer 2 for DOCSIS access networks using OpenFlow

Over the last few years, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged as one of the most disruptive and profitable novelties in networking. SDN was originally conceived to improve performance and reduce costs in Ethernet-based networks and it has been widely adopted in data center and campus networks. Similarly, thanks to the introduction of SDN concepts, access networks will benefit from the higher control, the lower maintenance costs and the better remote access to devices of SDN. However, its application to access networks is not straightforward and imposes great challenges to vendors and network operators, since current SDN technologies are not prepared to handle the provisioning of user equipment, specific port management or QoS requirements of common access networks. Most recent trends dealing with the SDN-ization of access networks advocate for the use of simple devices at the customer premises and the virtualization of the networking functionalities, requiring the provisioning of Layer 2 services in many cases. In such a scenario, this paper presents an architecture that brings SDN to common access networks using legacy equipment. In a nutshell, the architecture is based on the abstraction of the access network as a wide area OpenFlow switch where QoS-enabled pipes are dynamically created leveraging the high granularity of the OpenFlow protocol for packet classification. Furthermore, the OpenFlow protocol itself has been extended in order to support the advanced QoS requirements that are common to most access networks. The architecture has been implemented for DOCSIS access networks and it has been validated and evaluated using a real testbed deployed at our laboratory. The obtained results show that the architecture remains compliant with the ITU-T QoS recommendations and that the cost of introducing the elements required by the architecture in terms of service performance is negligible.European Commission, Seventh Framework Programme, through the ALIEN (317880) project Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the Secure deployment of services over SDN and NFV based networks project S&NSEC TEC2013-47960-C4-3-