Publications by Christian Stückelberger

Programmable networks are quickly gaining popularity in both academic research and industry, as they provide a new way to deal with network management. Several deployments by industry including Microsoft and Google already demonstrate the advantages of such paradigm shifts. Despite the initial momentum in the development of logically centralized control logic, i.e. the network controller, a shift towards proprietary industry-driven solutions is observed. Part of the problem is that open source academic-backed controllers have difficulties to scale at the level required by industry operation, particularly when it comes to the speed of operation. This thesis investigates a new approach towards the controller platform by adopting a dataflow processing framework as the computational foundation. At the same time it introduces the base of a more formal way to reason about network management. Specifically, the thesis builds around a representation of the network as a graph which allows us to specify high-level configuration policies as constraints on top of this graph and use well-understood graph computations in a data-parallel and incremental fashion to calculate the network routing. Our results demonstrate a very competitive performance of the routing module even before potential optimizations are conducted. Furthermore, interaction with the system is intuitive and human-friendly thanks to the higher-level policies we introduce.

@mastersthesis{abc,
	abstract = {Programmable networks are quickly gaining popularity in both academic research and industry, as they provide a new way to deal with network management. Several deployments by industry including Microsoft and Google already demonstrate the advantages of such paradigm shifts. Despite the initial momentum in the development of logically centralized control logic, i.e. the network controller, a shift towards proprietary industry-driven solutions is observed. Part of the problem is that open source academic-backed controllers have difficulties to scale at the level required by industry operation, particularly when it comes to the speed of operation. This thesis investigates a new approach towards the controller platform by adopting a dataflow processing framework as the computational foundation. At the same time it introduces the base of a more formal way to reason about network
management. Specifically, the thesis builds around a representation of the network as a graph which allows us to specify high-level configuration policies as constraints on top of this graph and use well-understood graph computations in a data-parallel and incremental fashion to calculate the network routing. Our results demonstrate a very competitive performance of the routing module even before potential optimizations are conducted. Furthermore, interaction with the system is intuitive and human-friendly thanks to the higher-level policies we introduce.},
	author = {Christian  St{\"u}ckelberger },
	school = {149},
	title = {Expressing the Routing Logic of a SDN Controller as a Differential Dataflow},
	year = {2016}
}