NeTS: Small: Participatory Software Defined Networking

如今，网络配置和管理是一项复杂且容易出错的任务，由专家管理员完成，他们将策略作为异构设备上独立控制规则的脆弱组合来实现。网络变得窒息，因为对配置的更改在所产生的策略中具有难以预测的后果。 与此同时，对于更动态的网络，存在相反方向的压力，因为越来越多的分布式应用可以从网络灵活性中受益，并且实际上具有关于其流量的语义的信息，可以通知网络配置。 该项目的目标是使最终用户应用程序能够积极参与网络的配置、配置和管理，进而对网络状态有更多的可见性，以便更好地重新配置自己。 所提出的方法，扩展的软件定义的网络，旨在成为一个统一的和可扩展的框架，暴露网络控制机制和状态的最终用户应用程序。它利用了软件定义网络的新兴范例，其逻辑集中和可编程控制平面，并在操作系统的类比中，提供了“对网络的用户级系统调用”。 应用程序请求当前和未来的服务属性，获得对网络属性的可见性，并提供有关网络未来需求的提示。 研究将结合联合收割机编程语言技术来定义策略和查询语言的语义和编译，并在真实的应用指导下，在真实的可编程网络测试床上进行系统设计和实验。该项目的贡献是通过统一和可扩展的框架将网络的控制平面暴露给最终用户应用程序，以解决使其安全和高效的挑战，并最终允许应用和网络的根本联合优化。更具体地说，这项工作将：（1）定义的语义授权所需的安全暴露的控制平面的最终用户应用程序的权限。(2)定义策略的高级分层表示，具有用于跨若干网络资源的来自不同用户的策略组合的灵活语义。(3)从高级组合策略到交换机上的高效分布式规则集，产生一个合理的编译策略;（4）考虑到应用程序的灵活性和要求以及网络的约束和负载，提出并评估应用程序和网络的联合优化。拟议的研究结果将广泛适用于普通网络用户，在网络基础设施的效率，安全性，共享和易用性方面具有直接，切实的好处。 渐进式联网将使家庭用户（或其应用程序，代表用户）能够根据直观的策略有效地配置网络。网络查询可以为无处不在的网络“天气服务”提供基础，这可以对用户期望产生积极影响。校园网络上的重度用户（如物理学家）将能够安全地共享网络，而无需物理上独立的网络。企业用户将能够在网络中更深处安装防火墙规则，而无需人工干预。 应用程序和数据中心网络的协同优化将使大规模数据处理效率显著提高，从而帮助推动科学和商业的发展。PI将整合本科生的研究，并将创建一个先进的网络课程，重点放在SDN和网络中心。他将继续在NSF赞助的Artemis项目中向9年级的女孩们讲述网络和互联网。

Network configuration and management today is a complex and error-prone task, done by expert administrators, who implement policies as a brittle composition of independent control rules on heterogeneous devices. Networks become stifled, as changes to configuration have hard-to-predict consequences in the resulting policies. At the same time, there is pressure in the opposite direction for more dynamic networks, as increasingly distributed applications can benefit from network flexibility, and actually have information about the semantics of their traffic that can inform network configuration. The goal of this project is to enable end-user applications to take active part in the configuration, provisioning, and management of the network, and, in turn, have more visibility into the network state to better reconfigure themselves. The proposed approach, Participatory Software Defined Networking, aims to be a unifying and extensible framework to expose network control mechanisms and state to end-user applications. It leverages the emerging paradigm of Software Defined Networking, with its logically centralized and programmable control plane, and, in an analogy to Operating Systems, provides the "user-level system calls to the network". Applications request current and future service properties, gain visibility into network properties, and provide hints about future demands to the network. The research will combine programming languages techniques to define the semantics of policy and query language and compilation, with systems design and experiments on a real programmable network testbed, guided by real applications.Intellectual Merit: The contributions of this project are to expose the control plane of the network to end-user applications through a unifying and extensible framework, to solve the challenges to make this safe and efficient, and ultimately to allow for radical joint optimization of applications and the network. More specifically, this work will: (1) define the semantics for the delegation of privileges necessary for the safe exposure of the control plane to end-user applications. (2) define a high level hierarchical representation of policies, with flexible semantics for policy composition from different users, across several network resources. (3) produce a sound compilation strategy from the high level combined policies to efficient sets of distributed rules on switches and (4) propose and evaluate the joint optimization of applications and the network given the flexibilities and requirements of the former, and the constraints and load of the latter.Broader Impacts: The results of the proposed research will be broadly applicable to regular network users, with direct, tangible benefits in efficiency, security, sharing, and ease of use of the networking infrastructure. Participatory networking will enable home users (or their applications, on the users' behalf), to effectively configure the network according to intuitive policies. Network queries can provide the foundation for a ubiquitous "weather service" for networks, which can have positive effects on user expectations. Heavy users on campus networks, such as physicists, will be able to safely share the network without the need for physically separate networks. Enterprise users will be able to install firewall rules deeper in the network without requiring human intervention. Co-optimization of applications and datacenter networks will enable significantly more efficient large-scale data processing, helping advance science and business at large. The PI will integrate undergraduate students in the research, and will create a course on Advanced Networking focused on SDNs and in datacenters. He will continue to speak about networking and the Internet to the 9th-grade girls at the NSF-sponsored Artemis program.