Network-Wide Control and Management
Network-Wide Control and Management
Description |
Publications |
People |
Collaborators |
Funding
Description
Today's data networks are surprisingly fragile and difficult to
manage. We argue that the root of these problems lies in the
complexity of the control and management planes--the software and
protocols coordinating network elements--and particularly the way the
decision logic and the distributed-systems issues are inexorably
intertwined. We advocate a complete refactoring of the functionality
and propose three key principles--network-level objectives,
network-wide views, and direct control--that we believe should
underlie a new architecture. Following these principles, we identify
an extreme design point that we call "4D," after the architecture's
four planes: decision, dissemination, discovery, and data. The 4D
architecture completely separates a network's decision logic from
protocols that govern the interaction among network elements. The
Routing Control Platform (RCP) is one concrete realization of these
ideas, with an emphasis on network-wide control of the routing in a
single domain, while remaining backwards compatible with legacy
routers.
Publications
4D Architecture
(see also the CMU Web site)
-
Albert Greenberg, Gisli Hjalmtysson, David A. Maltz, Andy Meyers,
Jennifer Rexford, Geoffrey Xie, Hong Yan, Jibin Zhan, and Hui Zhang,
"A clean slate 4D approach to network
control and management," ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communications
Review, October 2005.
- Albert Greenberg, Gisli Hjalmtysson, David A. Maltz, Andy Myers,
Jennifer Rexford, Geoffrey Xie, Hong Yan, Jibin Zhan, Hui Zhang,
"Refactoring network control and
management: A case for the 4D architecture," CMU CS Technical
Report CMU-CS-05-117, September 2005.
- Jennifer Rexford, Albert Greenberg, Gisli Hjalmtysson, David A. Maltz,
Andy Myers, Geoffrey Xie, Jibin Zhan, and Hui Zhang,
"Network-wide decision making:
Toward a wafer-thin control plane,"
Proc. ACM SIGCOMM HotNets Workshop, November 2004
(David's slides).
Routing Control Platform (RCP)
-
Yi Wang, Michael Schapira, and Jennifer Rexford,
"Neighbor-Specific BGP: More flexible
routing policies while improving global stability," Proc. ACM
SIGMETRICS, June 2009. See also a brief
overview of why and
how an AS would deploy neighbor-specific BGP.
-
Yi Wang, Ioannis Avramopoulos, and Jennifer Rexford,
"Design for
configurability: Rethinking interdomain routing policies from the
ground up," in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in
Communications, April 2009.
An earlier version appeared in Proc. ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on
Internet Network Management (INM), August 2007. A
longer
version appears as "Morpheus: Enabling flexible interdomain routing
policies," Princeton Computer Science Technical Report TR-802-07, October 2007.
A earlier version appeared at the
CoNext Student Workshop, December 2006
(poster).
- Matthew Caesar, Donald Caldwell, Nick Feamster, Jennifer Rexford,
Aman Shaikh, and Jacobus van der Merwe,
"Design and implementation of a Routing
Control Platform,"
Proc. Networked Systems Design and Implementation, May 2005
(Matt's slides).
- Nick Feamster, Hari Balakrishnan, Jennifer Rexford, Aman Shaikh,
and Jacobus van der Merwe,
"The case for separating routing from routers,"
Proc. ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Future Directions in Network Architecture,
August 2004 (Nick's FDNA slides,
Aman's CCW slides).
Configuration in enterprise networks
invited paper, Proc. IEEE LANMAN Workshop,
June 2007 (short talk,
long talk).
The description of a kernel-level prototype is also available.
Don Caldwell, Anna Gilbert, Joel Gottlieb, Albert Greenberg, Gisli
Hjalmtysson, and Jennifer Rexford,
"The cutting EDGE of IP router
configuration," ACM SIGCOMM HotNets Workshop,
November 2003 (HotNets ppt slides,
longer ppt slides).
People
Collaborators
Funding
The 4D project is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation as part of the NeTS program. The initial RCP work was done while Jennifer Rexford was
at AT&T Labs--Research.