Software Defined Networking: The Data Centre Perspective

Overview

Software Defined Networking (SDN) has become a well-established networking paradigm. Flagship deployments include in-hause developed solutions by Google, Microsoft and Facebook. Understanding of SDN and its application for more flexible network control has become a necessity for future networking specialists. 

In this seminar we will get familiar with the basic concepts of SDN and look into details of how traffic engineering is carreid out. Traffice engineering (TE) is an important aspect of data centre management. TE includes a set of algorithms and strategies to handle traffic according to predefined objectives such as balancing link occupation, limiting the sending rate of hosts, etc. Through TE network operators can maximise the use of the network resource. 

Participation

Each participant is asked to select a paper and prepare a 10 min presentation highlighting the contributions of the paper. For the same paper a technical report is expected. Guideline on how to write the report you can downdload from here. 

The students taking the seminar benefit from building a set of general skills including:  

  • critical analysis through reviewing high-quality papers and pointing out advantages, weaknesses and potential improvements;
  • presentation skills through giving a presentation;
  • rethoric skills through class discussions and presentation;
  • collaborative skills through working as a team and preparing group reports. 

Schedule

Date Topic Paper

23.02

 Introduction Slides 

02.03
Switch-based monitoring: mirroring

Packet-Level Telemetry in Large Datacenter Networks
(sigcomm’15) (video)

Millions of Little Minions: Using Packets for Low Latency Network Programming and Visibility
(sigcomm’14) (slides) 
David Eschbach

09.03
Switch-based monitoring: sketches
 

SketchVisor: Robust Network Measurement for Software Packet Processing
(sigcomm’17) (video) (slides)
James Dermelj

16.03
Endpoint-based monitoring

 

Trumpet: Timely and Precise Triggers in Data Centers
(sigcomm'16) (video) (slides)
Alexander Hedges

Simplifying Datacenter Network Debugging with PathDump
(osdi’16) (video) (slides)
Luca Campanella

23.03

 Querying measurements

Quantitative Network Monitoring with NetQRE (sigcomm'17) (video) (slides)
Dimitri Wessels

30.03

 no lecture  

06.04

 no lecture   

13.04

 Heavy hitter

Heavy-Hitter Detection Entirely in the Data Plane
(sosr’17) (slides) 
Benjamin Rothenberger 

Let it Flow: Resilient Asymmetric Load Balancing with Flowlet Switching
(nsdi’17) (video) (slides) 
Fabian Rohr
 

20.04

 Load balancing

DRILL: Micro Load Balancing for Low-latency Data Center Networks
(hotnets'15) (sigcomm’17) (video) (slides)
Alexander Canals

Stateless Datacenter Load-balancing with Beamer
(nsdi’18) (slides nsdi) (slides)
Pascal Wiesmann 

27.04

 Congestion control
Costin Raiciu,  UP Bucuresti (Discussion with author)
Re-architecting datacenter networks and stacks for low latency and high performance
(sigcomm’17) (video)
 

04.05

 Traffic shaping

 Carousel: Scalable Traffic Shaping at End Hosts (sigcomm’17) (video) (slides sigcomm) (slides)
Christelle Gloor

Semi-Oblivious Traffic Engineering: The Road Not Taken (nsdi'18) (slides nsdi) (slides)
Nora Hossle

11.05

 no lecture  

18.05

 Correct behaviour

Credit-Scheduled Delay-Bounded Congestion Control for Datacenters (sigcomm’17) (video) (slides sigcomm) (slides) 
Leonid Bloch

Abstractions for Network Update (sigcomm'12) 
Lukas Humbel

25.05
Bandwidth guarantees
 
 

Application-driven bandwidth guarantees in datacenters (sigcomm'14) (slides)
Jack Clark

BwE: Flexible, Hierarchical Bandwidth Allocation for WAN Distributed Computing (sigcomm’15) (video) (slides)
Ritu Sriram

01.06
Pricing strategies
Ahmed El-Hassany, ETH (Invited talk)
BigBug: Practical Concurrency Analysis for SDN (sosr'17)

 

Examination

There is no formal examination at the end of the seminar. The final grade is formed by report (40%), presentation (20%), participation (30%), and group work (10%). 

Report submission dates (by midnight):

  • David, James, Alexander (H.), Luca and Dimitri: April 9
  • Benjamin, Fabian, Alexander (C.), Pascal: May 7
  • Leonid, Christelle, Nora: May 21
  • Lukas, Ritu: June 10

Groups

Group 1: Alexander (C.), Luca, David, Jack
Group 2: Alexander (H.), Ritu, Dimitri
Group 3: Benjamin, Fabian, Christelle, Leonid
Group 4: Lukas, Pascal, James, Nora

Contact