The new technology promises flexibility and increased efficiency in network resource allocation.
Three decades after the birth of the World Wide Web, scientists from Cornell University and the Open University of the Netherlands have presented a significant breakthrough in the field of Internet technologies. They have developed a new programmable network model that offers flexible management of the data transfer process on the Internet.
Anshuman Mohan, a graduate student at Cornell University and one of the authors of the study, stressed that earlier control over the process of transmitting information over the Internet was limited. Their development is aimed at providing finer management of this process, without slowing down the network.
In an award-winning paper at the ACM OOPSLA 2022 conference, the researchers laid the foundations for creating hardware and software systems that can flexibly configure routing.
A key element of the Internet infrastructure is a switch, a device the size of a small box that connects computers to a network and manages data flows. The switch's built-in packet scheduler is responsible for prioritizing and prioritizing data processing from multiple users - email messages, video calls, web page downloads, etc.
However, today the operation parameters of this important mechanism are set strictly and cannot be changed after the switch is manufactured. This makes it difficult to respond quickly to the changing needs of the network, according to the authors of the study.
"Which should take priority - your Netflix movie or the weather service's urgent warning of an impending hurricane?" asks Ph. D. student Mohan rhetorically. A routing policy that works today may not be optimal tomorrow.
The model of a software-defined network proposed in the article will solve this problem. It gives administrators the ability to customize the switch's internal software that is responsible for packet scheduling. Users will be able to change the routing policy every hour without changing the hardware.
"Our approach, which uses programming language theory techniques, demonstrates how a wide range of package scheduling policy options can be flexibly implemented on a single device," concludes Mohan.
Three decades after the birth of the World Wide Web, scientists from Cornell University and the Open University of the Netherlands have presented a significant breakthrough in the field of Internet technologies. They have developed a new programmable network model that offers flexible management of the data transfer process on the Internet.
Anshuman Mohan, a graduate student at Cornell University and one of the authors of the study, stressed that earlier control over the process of transmitting information over the Internet was limited. Their development is aimed at providing finer management of this process, without slowing down the network.
In an award-winning paper at the ACM OOPSLA 2022 conference, the researchers laid the foundations for creating hardware and software systems that can flexibly configure routing.
A key element of the Internet infrastructure is a switch, a device the size of a small box that connects computers to a network and manages data flows. The switch's built-in packet scheduler is responsible for prioritizing and prioritizing data processing from multiple users - email messages, video calls, web page downloads, etc.
However, today the operation parameters of this important mechanism are set strictly and cannot be changed after the switch is manufactured. This makes it difficult to respond quickly to the changing needs of the network, according to the authors of the study.
"Which should take priority - your Netflix movie or the weather service's urgent warning of an impending hurricane?" asks Ph. D. student Mohan rhetorically. A routing policy that works today may not be optimal tomorrow.
The model of a software-defined network proposed in the article will solve this problem. It gives administrators the ability to customize the switch's internal software that is responsible for packet scheduling. Users will be able to change the routing policy every hour without changing the hardware.
"Our approach, which uses programming language theory techniques, demonstrates how a wide range of package scheduling policy options can be flexibly implemented on a single device," concludes Mohan.
