As the Internet grows in users, applications, and traffic, communications technologies have to move quickly to keep up with the new ways people are using them—from increased use of video (like Google Hangouts) to entirely new forms of connectivity (like Project Loon). Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an area of research that can optimise network traffic flow, making it particularly important for ensuring today’s internet can keep up with tomorrow’s demands. An SDN network can act like a taxi dispatcher who intelligently matches taxis with the paths that best meet their needs based on current conditions.
Google has been working hard to optimize our own systems with smarter networking software, but we’re also contributing to research efforts around the world—after all, groups working together on these challenging issues are more likely to come up with big breakthroughs.
Recently, a research group we’re involved with had a great breakthrough! Researchers at ESnet in the USA; CSIRO and University of New South Wales in Australia; and REANNZ, Google, and Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, have built an SDN research network connecting three continents called TREEHOUSE.
TREEHOUSE will allow researchers to try important SDN experiments in ‘real world’ conditions outside the lab, and gain the kind of valuable operational experience that will help realise more of SDN’s practical benefits. For example, the group is particularly interested in seeing how networks could react and re-route traffic more quickly in case of faults, and also whether networks could ask for capacity for applications like streaming video before it’s needed.
The new network is already paying off. This week, researchers from ON.LAB (http://onlab.us) deployed their Open Network Operating System (ONOS) on TREEHOUSE. ONOS is controlling two Pica8 OpenFlow switches (those are types of devices that are compatible with SDN), and is carrying test traffic for REANNZ to the Internet. Being open source itself, ONOS will let researchers experiment with new features on high-performing networking hardware, and share them back with the community—something that would not be possible today with proprietary networking equipment. ONOS adds to a growing list of SDN software (including RouteFlow) that also runs on the TREEHOUSE network - allowing researchers to choose which software makes sense for them. We hope to conduct many more such experiments and try new platforms.
The coming decades are only going to put higher and higher demands on our network infrastructure, so it’s gratifying to see so much great research taking place in this area. Ultimately, advances in SDN will made the web a faster, safer, more productive place for everyone—now and in the future.
Posted by Josh Bailey, Software Engineer
