Software Defined Transport

Cloud network infrastructures, such as datacenter and
inter-datacenter networks, are increasingly expected to provide vital
support for cloud applications such as online services, big data
processing, large graph/matrix computation, and distributed storage.
The large variety of cloud applications have demanded a diverse range
of network service requirements such as minimizing flow completion
times, optimizing network utilization, meeting latency targets, and
satisfying fairness constraints across tenants. However, network
architectures used today are far from optimal for meeting these
requirements. This mismatch hurts customer experience and ultimately
leads to a loss of revenue for cloud service providers. In this talk,
we argue for a programmable network abstraction — A software defined
transport (SDT) architecture for optimizing cloud network
infrastructure. By providing a centralized programmable platform to
define network transport mechanisms in software, network operators can
easily schedule network resources to optimize for service requirements
in real time. However, explicit network resource scheduling at the
central controller would raise a serious latency and scalability
concern. To solve this issue, we proposed resource allocation
algorithms that can scale SDT to many of today's cloud network
infrastructures. Further, centralized network resource allocation can
cause severe, transient congestion because network devices may apply
changes at different times. We develop a novel technique that
leverages a small amount of scratch capacity on links to apply changes
in a provably congestion-free manner.
Chi-Yao Hong is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer
Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, co-advised
by Matthew Caesar and Brighten Godfrey. Before joining UIUC, he
received his Master's degree from the Department of Computer Science
and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University. His research
interest spans all aspects of networking, including network resource
scheduling, network measurement and security. He is particularly
interested in designing cloud network infrastructures to improve
performance of data centers and clouds. He is a recipient of the
Symantec Research Labs Graduate Fellowship (2012), the Best Paper
Award from Passive and Active Measurement Conference (2011), and the
Master's Thesis Award from ACM Taipei/Taiwan Chapter (2008).