IP networks today require massive effort to configure and manage. Ethernet is vastly simpler to manage, but does not scale beyond small local area networks. This paper describes an alternative network architecture called SEATTLE that achieves the best of both worlds: The scalability of IP combined with the simplicity of Ethernet. SEATTLE provides plug-and-play functionality via flat addressing, while ensuring scalability and efficiency through shortest-path routing and hash-based resolution of host information. In contrast to previous work on identity-based routing, SEAT-TLE ensures path predictability and stability, and simplifies network management. We performed a simulation study driven by real-world traffic traces and network topologies, and used Emulab to evaluate a prototype of our design based on the Click and XORP open-source routing platforms. Our experiments show that SEAT-TLE efficiently handles network failures and host mobility, while reducing control overhead and state requirements by roughly two orders of magnitude compared with Ethernet bridging.

Ideally, enterprise administrators could specify fine-grain policies that drive how the underlying switches forward, drop, and measure traffic. However, existing techniques for flowbased networking rely too heavily on centralized controller software that installs rules reactively, based on the first packet of each flow. In this paper, we propose DIFANE, a scalable and efficient solution that keeps all traffic in the data plane by selectively directing packets through intermediate switches that store the necessary rules. DIFANE relegates the controller to the simpler task of partitioning these rules over the switches. DIFANE can be readily implemented with commodity switch hardware, since all data-plane functions can be expressed in terms of wildcard rules that perform simple actions on matching packets. Experiments with our prototype on Click-based OpenFlow switches show that DI-FANE scales to larger networks with richer policies.

Abstract — Because Ethernet bridging does not scale, most enterprise networks consist of small Ethernet-based subnets interconnected by IP routers. Although Ethernet’s flat addressing and transparent bridging allow each subnet to run with minimal configuration, interconnecting subnets at the IP level introduces significant management overhead that increases with the size of the network. As an alternative, we propose a scalable and efficient zero-configuration enterprise (SEIZE) networking architecture. SEIZE provides plug-and-play capability via globally unique flat addressing, while ensuring scalability and efficiency through shortest-path routing and hash-based location resolution. Switches perform location resolution on demand and can cache the results to optimize routing paths and to reduce the number of location-resolution requests. We present a design overview of SEIZE and show that it attains the best of Ethernet and IP. I.

This paper introducesthe Axon, an Ethernet-compatibledevice for creating large-scale datacenter networks. Axons are inexpensive, practical devices that are demonstrated using prototype hardware. Functionally, Axons replace Ethernet switches and maintain full compatibility with existing Ethernet hosts. Between themselves, however, Axons transparently use source-routed Ethernet. This unlocks many benefits, such as improved network scalability, performance, and flexibility. In an Axon network, all state required to route a host’s packets is placed in the local Axon—the Axon to which the host is directly connected. Therefore, regardless of the scale of the network, the route computation and storage needs of a single Axon device only need to scale with the demands of its locally-connected hosts. This is in stark contrast to conventional switched Ethernet, which requires routing resources proportional to the traffic that flows through the device. Scalability is also increased by eliminating the use of packet flooding for automatic location and address discovery. Further, source-routed Ethernet increases network flexibility by supporting different route selection strategies. For example, shortest-path routing could be employed, or longer paths selected to minimize congestion by balancing traffic across redundant links. Categories andSubjectDescriptors

IP networks today require massive effort to configure and manage. Ethernet is vastly simpler to manage, but does not scale beyond small local area networks. This paper describes an alternative network architecture called SEIZE that achieves the best of both worlds: The scalability of IP combined with the simplicity of Ethernet. SEIZE provides plugand-play functionality via flat addressing, while ensuring scalability and efficiency through shortest-path routing and hash-based location resolution. We implemented a prototype of SEIZE using the Click and XORP open-source routing platforms, and evaluated system performance on Emulab. Additionally, to evaluate performance on larger scales, we performed a simulation study driven by real-world traffic traces and network topologies. Our experiments show that SEIZE attains near-optimal path efficiency, while reducing control overhead and table size by roughly two orders of magnitude compared with Ethernet bridging. 1.

The networks in campuses, companies, and data centers are growing larger and becoming more complicated to manage. Today, network operators devote tremendous time and effort to three key management tasks — routing, access control, and troubleshooting. Rather than trying to make today’s brittle networks easier to manage, we focus on new network designs that are inherently easier to manage and scale to many hosts, switches, and applications. We design and develop a new management system that scales the routing, access control, and performance diagnosis in enterprise and data center networks. The key challenges are the large number of hosts, switches, and applications in these networks and the need for flexible policies, while faced with strict memory and power constraints in the switches. To address these challenges, we propose three key ideas: (1) designing new data structures and algorithms that make effective use of limited memory in switches; (2) redirecting traffic when simple switches do not have enough memory to handle packets; (3) rethinking the division of labor among switches, hosts, and a centralized management system to make the network both flexible and scalable. Based on the key ideas, we propose a new management system that addresses the scalability challenges of routing, supporting flexible policies, and performance diagnosis with three key

Managing today’s data networks is highly expensive, difficult, and error-prone. At the center of this enormous difficulty lies configuration: a Sisyphean task of updating operational settings of numerous network devices and protocols. Much has been done to mask this configuration complexity intrinsic to conventional networks, but little effort has been made to redesign the networks themselves to make them easier to configure. As part of a broad effort to rearchitect networks with ease of configuration in mind, this dissertation focuses on enabling self-configuration in edge networks – corporate or university-campus, data-center, or virtual private networks – which are rapidly growing and yet significantly under-explored. To ensure wide deployment, however, selfconfiguring networks must be scalable and efficient at the same time. To this end, we first identify three technical principles: flat addressing (enabling self-configuration), traffic indirection (enhancing scalability), and usage-driven optimization (improving efficiency). Then, to demonstrate the benefits of these principles, we design, implement, and deploy practical network architectures built upon the principles. Our first architecture, SEATTLE, combines Ethernet’s self-configuration capability

Abstract—We present the architecture and protocols of ROME, a layer-2 network designed to be backwards compatible with Ethernet and scalable to tens of thousands of switches and millions of end hosts. ROME is based upon a recently developed geographic routing protocol, greedy distance vector (GDV). Switches in ROME do not need any location information. Protocol design innovations in ROME include a stateless multicast protocol, a Delaunay DHT, as well as routing and host discovery protocols for a hierarchical network. ROME protocols do not use broadcast. Extensive experimental results from a packet-level eventdriven simulator, in which ROME protocols are implemented in detail, show that ROME protocols are efficient and scalable to metropolitan size. Furthermore, ROME protocols are highly resilient to network dynamics. The routing latency of ROME is only slightly higher than shortest-path latency. To demonstrate scalability, we provide simulation performance results for ROME networks with up to 25,000 switches and 1.25 million hosts. I.