Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Telecom operators are demanding more flexible, scalable and energy efficient products. These challenges cannot be properly addressed with the rigid solutions provided by today's networking equipment. Moreover, we are observing an increased demand for network capacity to allow the simultaneous transfer of ever-larger amounts of data. This is mainly driven by the popularity of video sharing and streaming applications (e.g. Netflix and YouTube) and by a strong momentum in the data traffic growth generated by mobile devices. The goal of this project is to devise a network infrastructure and a set of components that would enable, in an efficient and platform-independent manner, to rapidly introduce and modify network features according to market demand. Indeed, the fundamental concept of ""platform portability"" is necessary to guarantee a flexible network deployment. Thus, we are proposing the development of new hardware components that are adapted to new paradigms, such as to keep pace and get ahead of network operator requirements. We also propose the development of a simulator and modeling environment to assess the effectiveness of new hardware, and to be able to experiment different configurations of hardware components such as chassis, board, processing unit, and memory. Topics addressed by this project include the development of tools for designing a more flexible network infrastructure for operators. This novel network architecture is intended to support a wide range of networking applications: from switching, routing, and policy-based routing, to Access Control List (ACLs) and more complex applications at higher packet-processing layers. The availability of such capabilities will improve the ability of network operators to quickly provide new services within their networks, especially when considering the current limitations of networking equipment.