CIS5930 Software Defined Networking, Fall 2016

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging networking technology that has been rapidly changing the networking industry and networking research. By separating the network control from the underlying packet forwarding hardware, SDN lowers the entry-point for innovation in network control and enables a global approach to specify complex networking tasks in one single control framework, which promises significant simplification of network management, control, and monitoring. SDN has gained significant traction among major industrial players including Cisco, Broadcom, Google, IBM, and Intel, and has been deployed in wide area networks, campus networks, and data centers. In this class, you will learn the fundamentals of SDN and gain hands-on experience.

Lecture 1 (August 29): Syllabus and introduction

• Syllabus, Introduction
• Reading (required): The Road to SDN: An Intellectual History of Programmable Networks by Nick Feamster, Jennifer Rexford and Ellen Zegura, ACM CCR April 2014.

Lecture 2 (August 31): Challenges in configuring today's Internet routers (Guest lecture by Yu Wang), An example

Lecture 3 (September 7): SDN evolution

Lecture 4 (September 12): SDN basics and OpenFlow

• SDN basics and OpenFlow
• Homework 1 (Due Sept. 14 before class)
• Homework 2: install Virtualbox, Xming, and Mininet VM in a laptop, perform basic testing by doing a number of steps in Mininet Walkthrough (http://mininet.org/walkthrough). (Due Sept. 14 before class)

Lecture 5 (September 14, September 19): Mininet and OpenFlow Lab

• Mininet, lab3.py, lab3_controller.py, my_lab4.py
• Homework 3: Write a POX controller that realizes the rules in homework 1 (Due Sept. 19 before class; submit your controller, test program, and a READM file describing how to run you code)
• Programming Assignment 1: ECMP with SDN (Due Sept. 29 before class; submit your controller, test program,\ and a READM file describing how to run you code)

Lecture 6 (September 21): OpenFlow Controllers

• Reading: B4: Experience with a Globally-Deployed Software Defined WAN, SIGCOMM, 2013

Lecture 7 (September 26): An SDN application: Google B4

• Homework (no submission): list all challenges that you can think of for widely deploying SDN in different contexts (potentially in the Internet scale). The class will be discussing this in the next lecture period

Lecture 8 (September 28): SDN challenges

• Prepare to discuss SDN controller scalability issues, possible solutions, and what it takes to do research in this area.
• Reading:
  • Onix: a Distributed Control Platform for Large-Scale Production Networks, OSDI, 2010
  • Kandoo: a Framework for Efficient and Scalable Offloading of Control Applications

Lecture 9 (October 3): Controller Scalability

Lecture 10 (October 5): SDN programming I: issues with programming over POX

Lecture 11 (October 10): SDN programming II

Lecture 12 (October 12): "Beehive: Simple Distributed Programming in Software Defined Networks," ACM SOSR, 2016

• "Compiling Minimum Incremental Update for Modular SDN Language", HotSDN, 2014.
• "Abstractions for network update", SIGCOMM, 2012

Lecture 13 (October 18): SDN Network Updates

Lecture 14 (October 20): "NetKAT: Semantic Foundations for Network", ACM POPL, 2014.

Lecture 15 (October 24): Programmable Data Plane

Lecture 16 (October 26): "Real Time Network Policy Checking Using Header Space Analysis"

Lecture 17 (October 31): SDN virtualization

Lecture 18 (November 2): "PISCES: A Proammable, Protocol Independent Software Switch"

Lecture 19 (November 7): Middleboxes, SDN and NFV

Lecture 20 (November 9):

• "Your Data Center Switch is Trying too hard", ACM Symposium on SDN Research, 2016.
• "Packet Transactions: High-Level Programming for Line-Rate Switches." SIGCOMM, 2016.

Lecture 21 (November 21): SDN and Security

Lecture 22 (November 28): SDN security 2

Lecture 23 (November 30): Interdomain SDN

• Stitching Inter-Domain Paths over IXPs, SOSR' 2016.
• Authorizing Network Control at Software Defined Internet Exchange Points, SOSR, 2016.

Lecture 24 (Dec 4): "Don't Mind the Gap: Bridging Network-wide Objectives and Device-level Configurations", SIGCOMM 2016, local copy of the slide

• SDN Reading list
• Mininet
• Open Networking Foundation that has OpenFlow specifications