Alexander Shalimov

Advanced study of SDN/OpenFlow controllers

This paper presents an independent comprehensive analysis of the efficiency indexes of popular open source SDN/OpenFlow controllers (NOX, POX, Beacon, Floodlight, MuL, Maestro, Ryu). The analysed indexes include performance, scalability, reliability, and security. For testing purposes we developed the new framework called hcprobe. The test bed and the methodology we used are discussed in detail so that everyone could reproduce our experiments. The result of the evaluation show that modern SDN/OpenFlow controllers are not ready to be used in production and have to be improved in order to increase all above mentioned characteristics.

FIB efficiency in distributed platforms

The Internet routing ecosystem is facing substantial scalability challenges due to continuous, significant growth of the state represented in the data plane. Distributed switch architectures introduce additional constraints on efficient implementations from both lookup time and memory footprint perspectives. In this work we explore efficient FIB representations in common distributed switch architectures. Our approach introduces substantial savings in memory footprint transparently for existing hardware. Our results are supported by an extensive simulation study on real IPv4 and IPv6 FIBs.

How to represent IPv6 forwarding tables on IPv4 or MPLS dataplanes

The Internet routing ecosystem is facing substantial scalability challenges on the data plane. Various “clean slate” architectures for representing forwarding tables (FIBs), such as IPv6, introduce additional constraints on efficient implementations from both lookup time and memory footprint perspectives due to significant classification width. In this work, we propose an abstraction layer able to represent IPv6 FIBs on existing IP and even MPLS infrastructure. Feasibility of the proposed representations is confirmed by an extensive simulation study on real IPv6 forwarding tables, including low-level experimental performance evaluation.

Efficient FIB Representations on Distributed Platforms

The Internet routing ecosystem is facing substantial scalability challenges due to continuous, significant growth of the state represented in the data plane. Distributed switch architectures introduce additional constraints on efficiency of implementations from both lookup time and memory footprint perspectives. In this paper we explore efficient forwarding information base (FIB) representations in common distributed switch architectures. Our approach introduces substantial savings in memory footprint transparently for existing hardware. Our results are supported by an extensive simulation study on real IPv4 and IPv6 FIBs.

On Bringing Software Engineering to Computer Networks with Software Defined Networking

The software defined networking paradigm becomes more and more important and frequently used in area of computer networks. It allows to run software that manages the whole network. This software becomes more complicated in order to provide new functionality that was impossible to imagine before. It requires better performance, better reliability and security, better resource utilization that will be possible only by using advanced software engineering techniques (distributed and high availability systems, synchronization, optimized Linux kernel, validation techniques, and etc).

On the estimation of the execution frequency of sequential program code snippets

Formulas that make it possible to obtain guaranteed interval estimates of the execution frequency of code snippets of the sequential program are given based on asymptotic approximations obtained using the probability theory’s limit theorems. The selection method of appropriate approximation is described based on current estimates of the approximation accuracy of the binomial distribution by normal and Poisson distributions.