The inability to change core functionality beyond a simple packet forwarding service has hindered innovation in the Internet. Although the architectural simplicity of the Internet has likely led to its massive success, it has also had unintended consequences. For example, there is little intrinsic support to measure and monitor the Internet, which makes effective management challenging and has confounded efforts to gain a deep understanding of the Internet's structure and behavior. In addition, real-time applications often rely on overlay networks and application-level optimizations to deliver acceptable performance to users. Moreover, various network security devices are deployed as extrinsic, isolated systems to detect and respond to attacks; methods to detect and react to security threats could be much more effective if there were coordinated detection and response mechanisms integral to the Internet.
Intellectual Merit: This project develops a new approach for enhancing the functionality of Internet routers, toward the goal of enabling the development of future applications and services. The aim of the research is to provide programmable mechanisms on routers and similar Internet devices to enable service providers, application developers, and researchers to harness in-network capabilities. A new framework for programming network routers will be developed based on primitive functions that enable and expose new and useful capabilities in the Internet. These primitives will be designed to provide in-network support for measurement and monitoring of the Internet, real-time applications, and network security.
Broader Impact: A reference design and implementation of the programming framework will be made openly available to researchers and deployed and evaluated in the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) experimental network. In this setting, researchers will be able to use it to test research ideas that require or could benefit from additional in-network capabilities. In addition, tutorials will be held to introduce researchers to the system. Undergraduate students will participate in the research activities of this project. Moreover, new course materials will be developed and tailored to undergraduates at smaller institutions. Two sets of coursework will be developed: one for use with a popular reconfigurable hardware system (the NetFPGA) and another for use with the router programming framework to be developed. The educational materials will be made openly available to other undergraduate institutions and workshops will be held to disseminate the materials to the educational community.
