Current Projects

Monitoring and Improving Video-conferencing Sessions in the Data Plane — Video-conferencing applications, such as Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom, have gained popularity over the past several years. These applications are sensitive to network delay and data-intensive as they use high-quality webcam and audio streams. As a result, small changes in the underlying network conditions can have a significant impact on the user-perceived quality of an online meeting. Reduced network bandwidth results in poor audio or video quality or even frozen pictures; increased network delay results in lag which can make conversations difficult. In this project, we aim to understand how the network impacts the quality and performance of video-conferencing sessions in the wild and how modern programmable network devices can be leveraged to improve the quality of experience (QoE) of such applications. We are particularly interested in developing techniques to monitor the quality of video conferences as they take place, answer why a performance anomaly is occurring, and, subsequently, reconfigure the network or apply custom packet processing logic that improves meeting quality in real time.

Previous Projects

Next-Generation Network Telemetry and Analytics — Traditionally, network monitoring and analytics systems rely on aggregation (e.g., flow records) or sampling to cope with high packet rates. This has the downside that, in doing so, we lose data granularity and accuracy, and in general limit the possible network analytics we can perform. Recent proposals leveraging software-defined networking or programmable hardware provide more fine-grained, per-packet monitoring but still are based on the fundamental principle of data reduction in the network, before analytics. In this work, we provide a first step towards a cloud-scale, packet-level monitoring and analytics system based on stream processing entirely in software. Software provides virtually unlimited programmability and makes modern (e.g., machine-learning) network analytics applications possible. We identify unique features of network analytics applications which enable the specialization of stream processing systems. As a result, an evaluation with our preliminary implementation shows that we can scale up to several million packets per second per core and together with load balancing and further optimizations, the vision of cloud-scale per-packet network analytics is possible.

Defragmenting the Cloud — Network virtualization is an extensively used approach to allow multiple tenants with different network architectures and services to coexist on a shared data center infrastructure. Core to its realization is the mapping (or embedding) of virtual networks onto the underlying substrate infrastructure. Existing approaches are not suitable for cloud environments as they lack its most fundamental requirement: elasticity. To address this issue, we introduce two new network primitives – expand and contract – which allow virtual networks to scale up and down. Mapping and scaling virtual networks over time, however, introduces fragmentation in the substrate network. This is akin to fragmentation in a file system where files are not laid out in contiguous physical blocks of the storage device. We define metrics for fragmentation and show that this problem not only negatively impacts the revenue of the data center provider as the virtual network acceptance rate decreases, but also profoundly impacts network performance and reliability for tenants and their applications. Instead of further improving embedding algorithms to tackle this problem, in this work, we present a yet unexplored approach: leveraging network migration techniques to defragment the network. We introduce network defragmentation as a new management primitive and propose algorithms to materialize it. We show through extensive simulations that our techniques significantly improve network performance while maintaining high utilization of the infrastructure, thus increasing provider revenue. On average, using defragmentation leads to 20% reduction in path length and utilization and cuts the number of very long paths (longer than half of the network diameter) between 52% and 62%. Moreover, it doubles the number of servers utilized by 50% or less as a result of consolidating resource utilization.

Policy Routing using Process-Level Identifiers — Enforcing and routing based on network-wide policies remains a crucial challenge in the operation of large-scale enterprise and datacenter networks. As current dataplane devices solely rely on layer 2 – layer 4 identifiers to make forwarding decisions, there is no notion of the exact origin of a packet in terms of the sending user or process. In this project we ask the question: Can we go beyond the MAC? That is, can fine-grained process-level information like user ids, process ids or a cryptographic hash of the sending executable be semantically used to make forwarding decisions within the network? We designed a system architecture and implemented an early prototype leveraging the P4 technology for protocol-independent packet processing and forwarding in conjunction with on-board tools of the Linux operating system. Using this system we are able to make forwarding decisions within the network based on fine-grained process-level identifiers that are traditionally only available within a host’s operating system.

Network Abstractions in the Application Layer — Many of todays applications (in particular data processing applications) use intra-application networks to connect computing elements. By making intra-application networks part of the network itself, we simplify applications by providing an abstraction of the network, freeing applications from the responsibility of maintaining their own internal topology management and forwarding systems. Also, moving the network edge into the applications allows the network management to leverage advances such as software-defined networking, providing a unified management across an entire path. For these networks we are inspecting a new interface to the network based on intra-application channels told to the network rather than addresses.

SDN Controller Architecture — While there is a broad variety of SDN controllers (both proprietary and open source) available, we investigate the commonalities between SDN controllers (often referred to as the network operating system) and traditional operating systems. We believe network application should be developed against an API that is similar to that of existing operating systems. That is that SDN applications should run independently from each other and not in a monolithic design (like today’s controllers suggest it). Also applications should be able take advantage of features that operating systems already provide (such as access control and process management). In this area I am particularly interested in how such independent applications are composed and are granted access to the network configuration.

Low Latency Networking — Latency is an extremely important quality metric of computer networks. While network hardware can be designed and provisioned to provide low latency on average, heavy tails are pervasive in latency distributions of almost all classes of networks due to a variety of reasons. We investigate several techniques how to reduce this latency tail and provide networking at the speed of light with a more uniform latency distribution compared to what today’s networks are able to achieve. Strategies such as redundant multi- or single-path routing, as well as adaptive source routing across wide-area networks showed extremely satisfactory early results.