Research Summaries

Back A Platform for Software-based Network Capabilities

Fiscal Year 2016
Division Graduate School of Operational & Information Sciences
Department Computer Science
Investigator(s) Volpano, Dennis M.
Sponsor Marine Corps Forces Cyberspace Command (Marine Corps)
Summary An important part of extending cyberspace capabilities is being able to create the networks that deliver content more flexibly and easily. Ideally they would be defined completely in software. Software-defined networking (SON) has made some progress here by allowing routers and switches to be controlled in a logically centralized way. However, SON is limited to controlling conventional network devices. So it is unsuitable as a platform for building new capabilities. A more promising platform decomposes network functions into basic software operators and combines them in different ways to build the necessary capabilities. This has two major advantages: 1) capabilities are guaranteed to be correct and secure, and 2) they are realized in software running on relatively inexpensive commodity x86 devices, not commercial switches and routers. We propose to develop a prototype of such a platform. Specifically, we plan to build a base set of operators and then design a compiler to compile them into executables.
Keywords computer networking extensible network platforms software-defined networking
Publications Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal