Guru Parulkar A Case for Rethinking the Internet Architecture: Some Promising Approaches

The Stanford Clean Slate Program Executive Summary  Internet has been a great success –Has emerged to be a great platform for innovations  It is time to reinvent Internet infrastructure –Being subject to uses and abuses it is not designed for –Can be a even bigger platform for innovations  Many promising approaches being put forward –Infrastructure virtualization and programmability key  CIO organizations have a big role to play –Active collaboration with “infrastructure” researchers important

Internet Has Been A Transformative Infrastructure Top 20 Engineering Innovations of 20th Century A Century of Innovations (National Academy of Engineering)

The Stanford Clean Slate Program Internet Ossification IP KazaaVoIPMailNewsVideoAudioIMYouTube Applications TCPSIPUDPRTP Transport protocols Ethernet SatelliteOpticalPower linesBluetoothATM IP on everything HTTP Everything on WEB Continued Innovations Ossification

The Stanford Clean Slate Program State of Internet “… in the thirty-odd years since its invention, new uses and abuses, …, are pushing the Internet into realms that its original design neither anticipated nor easily accommodates.” “Freezing forevermore the current architecture would be bad enough, but in fact the situation is deteriorating.” Overcoming Barriers to Disruptive Innovation in Networking, NSF Workshp Report, 05.

The Stanford Clean Slate Program Internet Architecture Limitations  Security & robustness - to support other critical infrastructures  Control and management  Addressing, naming & (inter-domain) routing  Mobility of hosts and networks  Economic viability of different stakeholders  Scaling of service innovations

The Stanford Clean Slate Program IP Narrow Waist Not Designed to Absorb Innovations  IP narrow waist architecture very successful  The IP narrow waist decides Internet architecture and thus its behavior –Trust and security –QoS –Mobility –…  IP narrow waist difficult to change and evolve –Not designed for evolution –Does not “absorb” innovations to the narrow waist IP

The Stanford Clean Slate Program Internet Architecture Does Not Support Scaling of Services Applications Network Substrate New service providers have to build and deploy their own infrastructure -- tremendous barrier Service innovation starts at the edges Scaling successful services requires migrating into the infrastructure

The Stanford Clean Slate Program Future Internet Research Agenda  GENI Research Plan –Compelling & comprehensive case for rethinking Internet –100+ page with two years of work –  Not universally admired –One group -- too broad –Another group -- not broad enough –“Classic science” missing -- maybe it should?? More a reflection of how CS community doesn’t still know how to champion multiple big agendas

The Stanford Clean Slate Program Momentum Building: Funding  NSF: GENI Initiative –FIND and other research programs –GENI as a facility for experimentation  US multi-agency study on advanced networking  Europe –FIRE and other complementary programs  Japan, Korea, …

The Stanford Clean Slate Program Momentum Building: Research  NSF FIND projects:  European FIRE awards  Many ideas from the past few years  Stanford Clean Slate Internet Design Program

The Stanford Clean Slate Program Executive Summary  Internet has been a great success –Has emerged to be a great platform for innovations  It is time to reinvent Internet infrastructure –Being subject to uses and abuses it is not designed for –Can be a even bigger platform for innovations  Many promising approaches being put forward –Infrastructure virtualization and programmability key  CIO organizations have a big role to play –Active collaboration with “infrastructure” researchers important

The Stanford Clean Slate Program The Stanford Clean Slate Program Bring together Stanford’s breadth and depth: Networking, optical communications, wireless, access networks, theory, economics, security, applications, multimedia, operating systems, hardware and VLSI, system architecture, … Research for long term impact on the practice of networking Two pronged approach: “innovations in the small” and “innovations in the large” Funding Industry Collaborators & Sponsors: Cisco, DT, DoCoMo, NEC, Xilinx Government Agencies: NSF, DARPA, … Clean slate as a research process, not necessarily as a deployment strategy

The Stanford Clean Slate Program Broad Interdisciplinary Focus Network Architectures Heterogeneous Applications Heterogeneous PHY Technologies Security Robustness Economics Policies

The Stanford Clean Slate Program Architectural Blueprint of Future Internet? E2E Secured Network Backbone (Lightflow) Open Prog Mobile Internet 2020 EASI: Enable & Scale Innovations Flow Theory Security (Ethane) Wireless (Spectrum) Backbone (VLB) Congestion Control (RCP) Example Projects

The Stanford Clean Slate Program EASI: Goals Enhancing the Internet to make it an even more powerful engine for innovation. Two Motivating Cases  Architectural innovations –enabling fundamental changes to the Internet architecture  Service-level innovations –lowering barrier-to-entry for scalable service deployment Joint project between Stanford and Princeton University

The Stanford Clean Slate Program Future Infrastructure: Key Concepts Slicing, Virtualization, Programmability

The Stanford Clean Slate Program Future Infrastructure: Key Concepts Slicing, Virtualization, Programmability

The Stanford Clean Slate Program Future Infrastructure: Key Concepts Slicing, Virtualization, Programmability

The Stanford Clean Slate Program EASI Infrastructure Observations  Infrastructure includes –Computing, storage, packet/circuit switching resources  Slicing, virtualization, programmability –Across layers: layer 1 and up –Across resource types: computing, storage, net –End-to-end: end nodes, enterprise, regional, backbone, …  Functionality and performance both important

The Stanford Clean Slate Program Potential for Innovation  Allow network providers to support value-added services  Empower end-user innovation  Allow user-centric innovations to migrate into the network  Allow network architectures to evolve seamlessly  Provide economic viability to different stakeholders Democratization of Innovations Eric von Hippel

The Stanford Clean Slate Program EASI in Enterprise Controller To Internet

The Stanford Clean Slate Program EASI OpenFlow Network: Goals  A way for researchers to run experiments in the networks they use everyday.  Ease the deployment of GENI in college campuses.  A “pragmatic” compromise –Allow researchers to run experimental architectures in their network… –…without requiring vendors to expose internal workings.

The Stanford Clean Slate Program No obvious way  Commercial vendor won’t open software and hardware development environment –Complexity of support –Market protection and barrier to entry  Hard to build my own –Prototypes are flakey –Software only: Too slow –Hardware/software: Fanout too small (need >100 for wiring closet)

The Stanford Clean Slate Program Furthermore, we want…  Isolation: Regular production traffic untouched  Virtualized and programmable: Different flows processed in different ways  Equipment we can trust in our wiring closet  Open development environment for all researchers (e.g. Linux, Verilog, etc).  Flexible definitions of a flow –Individual application traffic –Aggregated flows –Alternatives to IP running side-by-side –… “Flow” is a useful granularity for virtualization

The Stanford Clean Slate Program Network Slicing and Virtualization: OpenFlow Switch Open API Flow Switch Flow Table Flow Table Secure Channel Secure Channel e.g. 48-ports of 1GE, or wireless access point. Linux PC Simple Protocol SSL hw sw Packet processing: If flow in table, forward packet Else, send to controller Packet processing: If flow in table, forward packet Else, send to controller 1.Decides which flows to allow 2.Programs flow-table 1.Decides which flows to allow 2.Programs flow-table

The Stanford Clean Slate Program Customized Flow Processing Ivo Flow Table Flow Table Secure Channel Secure Channel sw hw Normal Software Normal datapath Commercial Switch Open API Linux PC OpenFlow Protocol SSL NetFPGA Line-rate packet processing 1.Hardware virtualization 2.Congestion Control 3.Measurement 4.Packet inspection 5.New protocols 6.…? Line-rate packet processing 1.Hardware virtualization 2.Congestion Control 3.Measurement 4.Packet inspection 5.New protocols 6.…? Office Laboratory

The Stanford Clean Slate Program controller PC OpenFlow-enabled FT SC sw hw OpenFlow-enabled FT SC sw hw OpenFlow-enabled FT SC sw hw OpenFlow-enabled Commercial Switch Flow Table Flow Table Secure Channel Secure Channel sw hw Normal Software Normal Datapath OpenFlow-enabled FT SC sw hw Server room OpenFlow-enabled FT SC sw hw

The Stanford Clean Slate Program Deployment at Stanford Stanford Computer Science Department Gates Building ~1,000 network users Current network –Catalyst 4k in 22 wiring closets 100M Ethernet to desktops 2 x 1GE uplinks to basement –2 x Catalyst 6500 in basement 2 x 10GE uplinks to campus –Cat 4k coming to end of life Expect to announce building-wide OpenFlow shortly

The Stanford Clean Slate Program The EASI/GENI Big Picture OpenFlow switches, NetFPGA OpenFlow Network Aggregate Desktop, Clusters, Storage, etc. Other Enterprise GENI Components Enterprise GENI Clearinghouse Experimenter Controller: Aggregate Component Manager (ACM) on NOX

The Stanford Clean Slate Program Nationwide EASI Network Over Internet2 Backbone 1GE links EASI Enterprise

The Stanford Clean Slate Program Virtual World (VW) Environment  VW emerging to be another interesting application class  VW is very demanding and will push Internet to its limits –3D graphics, multimedia streaming and scalability critical –Scalable to 1M+ concurrent users & 50M registered users spread over world –A single VW environment to support many VW applications  Two big components of the environment –Massive content dissemination and large scale simulation –Neither one supported well on the current Internet

The Stanford Clean Slate Program VW Environment: High Level Structure Content Dissemination Simulation  “Simulation” models the VW for potentially 1M+ users –Increasingly better fidelity and responsiveness are key requirements  Content provided by providers and 50M+ participants –Higher quality multimedia and graphics content is a must  Content dissemination provides content to render relevant VW for 1M+ users

The Stanford Clean Slate Program VW Simulation A simple model: map the world being simulated on a 2D grid and assign each square of the grid to a processor

The Stanford Clean Slate Program VW Simulation on a Slice Data Center AData Center B Data Center CData Center D VW Simulation on a PVI that is customized for high end computing with dynamic topologies

The Stanford Clean Slate Program VW CDN on another Slice VW CDN on a slice that is customized for caching at the edges

The Stanford Clean Slate Program Research Scope Architecture for a Virtualizable & Programmable Network Substrate Diverse node configurations: data centers, backbone PoPs, enterprise networks, wireless APs Security, mobility, robustness, manageability, scalability Resource acquisition and configuration, programming models and tools Virtual worlds, gaming, ubiquitous computing, content dissemination, distributed storage, sensor integration, …

The Stanford Clean Slate Program Networking Research and CIO Org  s –Close collaboration between research groups and CIO org –PhD students worked for CIO and produced some of the best research  1990s and beyond –CIO orgs focused on providing service and keeping the infrastructure up –Research becoming too sterile -- not benefiting from CIO orgs insights, infrastructure, relationships with vendors –CIO orgs missing the fun and excitement of research and innovations Everyone loses, rate of innovations slows, vendors dominate. [There are of course exceptions: Google and Stanford]

The Stanford Clean Slate Program New Opportunities  Infrastructure virtualization –Multiple virtual infrastructures on same physical infra –Isolation between production & experimental traffic/infra –Production applications can opt-in into experimental infrastructure to exploit new capabilities  Stanford and Princeton want to bring this to your campus on commercial equipment –With EASI and OpenFlow  This is just beginning -- lots of innovations to come  Are you ready? Do you want to enable this?

The Stanford Clean Slate Program Executive Summary  Internet has been a great success –Has emerged to be a critical infrastructure for society  It is time to reinvent Internet infrastructure –Being subject to uses and abuses it is not designed for –Can be a even bigger platform for innovations  Many promising approaches being put forward –E.g., EASI and OpenFlow by Stanford and Princeton  CIO organizations have a big role to play –Infrastructure virtualization and OpenFlow can be key enablers