Magneto: Unified Fine-grained Path Control in Legacy and OpenFlow Hybrid Networks

Speaker:        Zhi-Li Zhang
                Qwest Chair Professor &
                McKnight Distinguished University Professor
                University of Minnesota

Title:          "Magneto: Unified Fine-grained Path Control in Legacy
                 and OpenFlow Hybrid Networks"

Date:           Friday, 21 July 2017

Time:           10:30am to 11:30am

Venue:          Room 1511 (near lifts 27/28), HKUST

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 wellplanned, "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.


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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/