Title of the talk: "Spielwiese Internet"
On February 7, 2012, Professor Dr. Anja Feldmann will give a talk about "Spielwiese Internet" in the context of the SFB 901 colloquium.
Abstract:
The ever growing demand for information of Internet users is putting a significant burden on the current Internet infrastructure who's architecture has been more or less unchanged over the last 30 years. Indeed, rather than adjusting the architecture, small fixes, e.g., MPLS, have been deployed within the core network.
Today, new technical abilities enable us to rethink the Internet architecture. In this talk we first highlight how Internet usage has changed in the area of user generated context. Then we explore two technology trends: Cloud networks and open hardware/software interfaces.
Virtualization, a main motor for innovation, decouples services from the underlying infrastructure and allows for resource sharing while ensuring performance guarantees. Server virtualization is widely used, e.g., in the clouds. However, cloud virtualization alone is meaningless without taking into account the network needed to access the cloud resources and data: cloud networks.
Current infrastructures are limited to use the tools provided by the hardware vendors as there are hardly any open software stacks available for network devices in the core. This hurts innovation. However, novel programming interfaces for network devices, e.g., OpenFlow, provide open hardware/software interfaces and may enable us to build a network OS with novel features. We outline initial work in this area.