NeTS: Small: The Design and Use of a Network Operating System

International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

Despite all the progress made in other areas of networking over the past few decades, the management of production networks has remained primitive. However, over the past five years a radically new approach to network management has emerged. This new approach uses a ?network operating system? to hide all the complexity of networking details from management applications while providing powerful primitives for programmatically observing and controlling the network. This project is focusing on three main areas of investigation: Building a next-generation network operating system: sophisticated management requires a network operating system that is scalable, reliable, and secure while also providing network operators with the appropriate set of primitives for controlling their networks; Applying this network operating system to a wide variety of contexts and requirements: a network operating system should support management in enterprise networks, home networks, wide-area networks, and datacenter networks, and should address issues ranging from access control to traffic engineering; Leveraging this approach to gain deeper understanding of networks: network operating systems should support higher-level abstractions ? such as policy languages, event reconstructions, and logical networks ? that allow operators to focus on management goals not implementation details. Addressing these topics will enable the deployment of more secure, reliable, cost-effective, and scalable networks. Moreover, the software from this project will be open-sourced, allowing these benefits to be realized by all.