AitF: FULL: Collaborative Research: Practical Foundations for Software-Defined Network Optimization

今天的社会非常依赖互联网服务。这些互联网服务的安全性和性能又取决于各个网络响应于不断变化的操作环境（例如，流量或攻击的突然增加或策略合规性要求的变化）。今天，网络运营商经常求助于临时和脆弱的解决方案，影响网络的安全性和性能。本计画的目标是将联合收割机理论与实务结合，以发展出能让网路管理员执行不同网路操作任务的基本机制。该项目将开发用于表达广泛的网络优化任务和算法基础的抽象，以推理并实现比当前最先进的最佳（或接近最佳）解决方案&。该项目将开发和发布开源工具包，大大减少原型开发和部署新型网络管理应用程序的时间，并将这些福利民主化，让更多的人受益。该项目将导致教育进步，帮助创造一个全面的劳动力，能够通过应用理论和实践相结合的转型研究来应对未来的技术挑战。该项目将积极鼓励代表性不足的群体参与，作为拟议工作的一部分，并指导他们成为未来的技术领导者。软件定义网络（SDN）是一种新兴的范式，通过将嵌入网络硬件配置中的策略移到在集中控制器中运行的软件来简化网络管理。然而，实现SDN的潜在好处目前需要大量的理论和实践工作。具体而言，许多SDN应用的核心是复杂的优化问题，以解决实践中出现的目标和要求。该项目的目标是设计和实现一个新的框架，使SDN应用开发人员能够用高级语言表达新的应用目标和约束，使用合理的算法方法生成接近最优的解决方案，然后生成可以直接部署到SDN控制平台的兼容配置。这一愿景要在实践中取得成功，有两个要求：（i）能够表达广泛的应用程序的需求，以及（ii）在响应应用程序需求的时间尺度上，可持续地生成可证明为最佳（或接近最佳）的配置。拟议的研究将调查理论基础和实际实施，以同时实现这两个目标。该项目的贡献将包括：（1）研究广泛的SDN应用中基于路径优化的鲁棒性，并开发算法以确保这种基于路径优化的重构不会牺牲效率;（2）为需要更多动态网络处理功能的应用设计更丰富的抽象，并为这些应用开发接近最优和实用的算法;（3）设计将解决方案从这样的理论框架到实际网络配置的有效优化-可维护的翻译;以及（4）在与最先进的网络管理平台的状态相集成的端到端开源工具中实现这些技术。

Society today critically depends on Internet services. The safety and performance of these Internet services in turn depends on the ability of individual networks to successfully​ manage and optimize their network configurations in reaction to a changing operating environment (e.g., sudden increases in traffic or attacks or changes in policy compliance requirements). Today, network operators often resort to ad hoc and brittle solutions that affect the safety and performance of the networks. The goal of this project is combine theory and practice to develop foundational mechanisms enabling network administrators to implement diverse network operations tasks. This project will develop abstractions for expressing a broad spectrum of network optimization tasks and algorithmic foundations to reason about and achieve optimal (or near-­optimal) solutions that will be better than current state-of-the-art. ​The project will develop and release open­-source toolkits that will dramatically reduce the time to prototype and deploy novel network management applications, and democratize these benefits for a larger audience. The project will lead to educational advances that help create a well­-rounded workforce capable of handling future technology challenges by applying transformational research that couples theory and practice. The project will actively encourage participation from underrepresented groups as part of the proposed work and mentor them to be future technology leaders.Software-­defined networking (SDN) is an emerging paradigm to simplify network management by moving policies embedded in the configurations of the network hardware to software running in centralized controllers. Realizing the potential benefits of SDN, however, currently requires significant theoretical and practical effort. Specifically, at the core of many SDN applications are complex optimization problems to tackle goals and requirements that arise in practice. These problems are ones for which good theoretical solutions are unknown.The goal of this project is to design and implement a novel framework that enables SDN application developers to express new application goals and constraints in a high-­level language, using a sound algorithmic approach to generate near­-optimal solutions, and then to generate compliant configurations that can be deployed to SDN control platforms directly. There are two requirements for this vision to be successful in practice: (i) the ability to express the requirements of a broad spectrum of applications and (ii)­­ generating provably optimal (or close ­to ­optimal) configurations, on a timescale that is responsive to application needs. The proposed research will investigate theoretical foundations and practical implementations to simultaneously achieve both goals. The project's contributions will include: (1) investigating the robustness of path-­based optimizations for a wide spectrum of SDN applications and developing algorithms for ensuring that such path­-based reformulations do not sacrifice efficiency; (2) designing richer abstractions for applications that require more dynamic network processing features and developing near­-optimal and practical algorithms for these applications; (3) designing efficient optimization-­preserving translations of solutions from such theoretical frameworks into practical network configurations; and (4) implementing these techniques in an end­-to-­end open-­source tool integrated with state­-of­-the-­art network management platforms.