資訊工程學系演講公告

內容摘要 Abstract：

Emerging software defined networking (SDN) is rapidly re-shaping the field of networking, both in terms of academic research and industrial development. With a (logically) centralized control plane and a programmatic match-action data plane abstraction, SDN  enables flexible, fine-grained network control and monitoring, and offers the potential to transform network management: from today’s largely manual process to an automated process governed by (high-level) network policies. Studies show that SDN can reduce the cost of operating a network by half. Thanks to these benefits, earliest adoption of SDN occurs in data centers, where size renders manual network management difficult. SDN has also been applied to wide-area networks (WANs), e.g., those connecting multiple data centers, to more effectively manage expensive WAN bandwidth. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) or carrier networks have also started considering the adoption of SDN. However, the majority of networks on the Internet are enterprise or campus networks, where deployment of SDN faces major challenges. Unlike data center networks with well-structured topologies, enterprise networks often evolve in a not well planned, “organic” fashion as the need for network connectivity and bandwidth grows. Unfortunately, upgrading existing enterprise networks, comprised of numerous “legacy” (layer-2 Ethernet) switches, to SDN is often cost-prohibitive. We argue that it is possible to achieve most of the benefits of a fully deployed SDN at a fraction of the cost by strategically replacing only few legacy switches with – or introducing a few – new SDN-capable switches in a legacy network, thus creating a hybrid network. In this talk, we present Magneto, a unified network controller that exerts SDN-like, fine-grained path control over both OpenFlow and legacy switches in hybrid networks. Magneto i) introduces magnet MAC addresses and dynamically updates IP-to-magnet MAC mappings at hosts via gratuitous ARP messages for visibility and routing control; and ii) uses the ability of SDN switches to send “custom” packets into the data plane to manipulate legacy

switches into updating forwarding entries with magnet MAC addresses for enhanced routing flexibility. Our evaluation on a lab testbed and through extensive simulations on large enterprise network topologies show that Magneto is able to achieve full control over routing when only 20% of network switches are programmable, with negligible computation and latency overhead.

個人簡介 A Brief Biography：

Zhi-Li Zhang received the B.S. degree in computer science from Nanjing University, China and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Massachusetts.  He joined the faculty of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota in 1997, where he is currently the Qwest Chair Professor in Telecommunications and Distinguished McKnight University Professor. He currently also serves as the Associate Director for Research at the Digital Technology Center, University of Minnesota.

Prof. Zhang's research interests lie broadly in computer communication and networks, Internet technology, multimedia and emerging applications. His past research was centered on the analysis, design and development of scalable Internet QoS solutions to support performance-demanding multimedia applications. His current research thrusts focus primarily on i) building  highly scalable, resilient  and secure Internet infrastructure and mechanisms to enhance Internet service availability, reliability, mobility, manageability and  security; and on ii) developing  next-generation, service-oriented, manageable and economically viable Internet architectures to  provide better support for creation, deployment, operations and and management of value-added Internet services and underlying networks.

Prof. Zhang has served on the Editorial Boards of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Computer Network -- an International Journal, Chinese Academy of Science's Journal of Computer Science and Technology, Springer's Journal of Computational Social Sciences. He was Technical Program Co-chair of IEEE INFOCOM 2006, ACM/USENIX Internet Measurement Conference (ACM/USENIX IMC'08), IEEE ICNP'13, and has served  on the  Technical Program Committees of various conferences and workshops including ACM SIGCOMM, ACM SIGMETRICS, ACM/USENIX IMC, IEEE INFOCOM, IEEE ICNP and CoNext. He received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 1997. He has also been awarded the prestigious McKnight Land-Grant Professorship and George Taylor Distinguished Research Award at the University of Minnesota, and the Miller Visiting Professorship at Miller Institute for Basic Sciences, University of California, Berkeley. Prof. Zhang is co-recipient of an ACM SIGMETRICS best paper award, an IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP) best paper award, an IEEE INFOCOM best paper award, a RAID best paper award and a SIMPLEX best paper award. He is a member of IEEE and ACM, and a Fellow of IEEE.

You can find more information about Prof. Zhang and his publications at http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~zhzhang/