EAGER Proposal - White Box Switch Testbed

Indiana University, Bloomington IN

Investigators

Abstract

Recent developments and availability of commoditized White Box (WB) and Bare Metal switch designs along with open network operating systems have opened the door for new and open source approaches to network software development. Interest is growing in the research community in these devices and the extraordinary development possibilities these devices enable, which may have long term implications for greatly expanding the national infrastructure at lower cost and with increased programming flexibility. Potential advantages of this emerging movement to the research and education networking community include; lower cost of ownership for commercial off the shelf hardware; development on widely available Linux-based network operating system; easier integration of network provisioning into available cloud orchestration tools; reduced time in deployment and provisioning; and increased intelligence throughout the network. This exploratory project at Indiana University investigates the scalability, functionality, and performance of WB platforms in combination with network operating systems and software defined networking technologies including OpenFlow implementations. The project includes creation of a testbed that is shared with network researchers.