[Nets-seminars] Seminar today 24/5/13

[Richard G. Clegg]

Don't forget today's seminar in GS102 66-72 Gower Street at 16:00. Our 
speaker is Charalampos (Haris) Rotsos from Cambridge.

Title:  A Unikernel approach to OpenFlow architecture simulation and 
emulation

Abstract:

SDN , and its predominant implementation the OpenFlow protocol, provide 
a flexible mechanism for network developers to evolve network 
functionality without any modifications in existing network and 
transport protocols. Nonetheless, transferring SDN network designs in 
production networks is not a straightforward process. SDN-enabled 
hardware performance is under-documented, while there is a luck of tools 
providing insights on the impact of new control mechanics in large scale 
networks. In order to aid SDN developers in performance reasoning, we 
propose a novel OpenFlow large scale simulation and emulation platform, 
which we call SDNsim. SDNsim builds on top of the Unikernel library OS 
(http://anil.recoil.org/papers/2013-asplos-mirage.pdf) abstraction and 
provides a generic mechanism to describe network functionality. Using 
the compilation mechanism of the framework, users can build from their 
specifications either high precision event-driven simulations of the 
system or fast Xen-based emulations. In this talk I will provide a high 
level description of the Unikernel architecture, the design and 
performance of the SDNsim platform and, driven by our exploration in 
network control, I will present a demo of its functionality.

Bio:
My name is Charalampos (Haris) Rotsos and I am a PhD student in Computer 
Laboratory, University of Cambridge. I received my MSc from in network 
communication from the Computer Science department, UCL. My research 
Interest are in Software Defined Networking, Network Measurement, 
Functional Programming and Machine Learning Application in Systems 
Analysis.

-- 
Richard G. Clegg,
Dept of Elec. Eng.,
University College London
http://www.richardclegg.org/