Control and Management for Next Generation Networks

当今互联网的结构带来了一些限制：它无法发挥无线通信等新兴技术的潜力；它不提供可用性和可靠性的任何保证；它本质上是不安全的；在当前的互联网中，找出问题的根源是极其困难的；对等的经济激励并不容易管理和创造；为了跟上不断增长的需求，它需要越来越多的电力，随着时间的推移，成本也越来越高。最近，人们对用一种全新的互联网设计来解决这些问题产生了极大的兴趣。一个很有希望的想法是使用软件定义网络（sdn），这已经引起了学术界和工业界的广泛关注。

The structure of today's Internet imposes several limitations: it cannot deliver the potential of emerging technologies such as wireless communications; it does not provide any guarantees on availability and reliability; it is intrinsically unsecure; identifying the root causes of problems is extremely difficult in the current Internet; economic incentives for peering are not easy to manage, and create; and in order to keep up with the growing demands, it needs more and more power, and becomes more costly over time. Recently, there has been a tremendous amount of interest in a clean slate design for the Internet to address these problems. One promising idea is to use Software-Defined Networks (SDNs) that has attracted a lot of attention both from academia and industry. Switching to software-defined networks poses several challenges and creates many opportunities. The existence of a centralized controller that has a global view of the entire network, and the simplicity of creating new applications and protocols are luxuries that we can use to provide new services, protocols, and functionalities that are prohibitively difficult in today's Internet. Globally optimized traffic engineering, congestion control, access control, and identity-based security are only a few of such possibilities. On the other hand, relying on a centralized control brings about various scalability, reliability, and potentially security challenges, that we need to address. This project aims at (i) design and implementation of new tools, and methods for a highly scalable and reliable control and management framework for next generation networks; (ii) design and development of a high level network management framework for home and enterprise software-defined networks; and (iii) creating globally optimized protocols that take advantage of the global network view available in software-defined networks.