Colin Dixon

Home automation in the wild: challenges and opportunities

Visions of smart homes have long caught the attention of researchers and considerable effort has been put toward enabling home automation. However, these technologies have not been widely adopted despite being available for over three decades. To gain insight into this state of affairs, we conducted semi-structured home visits to 14 households with home automation. The long term experience, both positive and negative, of the households we interviewed illustrates four barriers that need to be addressed before home automation becomes amenable to broader adoption. These barriers are high cost of ownership, inflexibility, poor manageability, and difficulty achieving security. Our findings also provide several directions for further research, which include eliminating the need for structural changes for installing home automation, providing users with simple security primitives that they can confidently configure, and enabling composition of home devices.

PAST: scalable ethernet for data centers

We present PAST, a novel network architecture for data center Ethernet networks that implements a Per-Address Spanning Tree routing algorithm. PAST preserves Ethernets self-configuration and mobility support while increasing its scalability and usable bandwidth. PAST is explicitly designed to accommodate unmodified commodity hosts and Ethernet switch chips. Surprisingly, we find that PAST can achieve performance comparable to or greater than Equal-Cost Multipath (ECMP) forwarding, which is currently limited to layer-3 IP networks, without any multipath hardware support. In other words, the hardware and firmware changes proposed by emerging standards like TRILL are not required for high-performance, scalable Ethernet networks. We evaluate PAST on Fat Tree, HyperX, and Jellyfish topologies, and show that it is able to capitalize on the advantages each offers. We also describe an OpenFlow-based implementation of PAST in detail.

The home needs an operating system (and an app store)

We argue that heterogeneity is hindering technological innovation in the home---homes differ in terms of their devices and how those devices are connected and used. To abstract these differences, we propose to develop a home-wide operating system. A HomeOS can simplify application development and let users easily add functionality by installing new devices or applications. The development of such an OS is an inherently inter-disciplinary exercise. Not only must the abstractions meet the usual goals of being efficient and easy to program, but the underlying primitives must also match how users want to manage and secure their home. We describe the preliminary design of HomeOS and our experience with developing applications for it.

OpenSample: A Low-Latency, Sampling-Based Measurement Platform for Commodity SDN

In this paper we propose, implement and evaluate OpenSample: a low-latency, sampling-based network measurement platform targeted at building faster control loops for software-defined networks. OpenSample leverages sFlow packet sampling to provide near-real-time measurements of both network load and individual flows. While OpenSample is useful in any context, it is particularly useful in an SDN environment where a network controller can quickly take action based on the data it provides. Using sampling for network monitoring allows OpenSample to have a 100 millisecond control loop rather than the 1-5 second control loop of prior polling-based approaches. We implement OpenSample in the Floodlight Open Flow controller and evaluate it both in simulation and on a test bed comprised of commodity switches. When used to inform traffic engineering, OpenSample provides up to a 150% throughput improvement over both static equal-cost multi-path routing and a polling-based solution with a one second control loop.

SDN traceroute: tracing SDN forwarding without changing network behavior

Software-defined networking provides flexibility in designing networks by allowing distributed network state to be managed by logically centralized control programs. However, this flexibility brings added complexity, which requires new debugging tools that can provide insights into network behavior. We propose a tool, SDN traceroute, that can query the current path taken by any packet through an SDN-enabled network. The path is traced by using the actual forwarding mechanisms at each SDN-enabled device without changing the forwarding rules being measured. This enables administrators to discover the forwarding behavior for arbitrary Ethernet packets, as well as debug problems in both switch and controller logic. Our prototype implementation requires only a few high-priority rules per device, runs on commodity hardware using only the required features of the OpenFlow 1.0 specification, and can generate traces in about one millisecond per hop.

Software defined networking to support the software defined environment

Software defined networking (SDN) represents a new approach in which the decision-making process of the network is moved from distributed network devices to a logically centralized controller, implemented as software running on commodity servers. This enables more automation and optimization of the network and, when combined with software defined compute and software defined storage, forms one of the three pillars of IBMs software defined environment (SDE). This paper provides an overview of SDN, focusing on several technologies gaining attention and the benefits they provide for cloud-computing providers and end-users. These technologies include (i) logically centralized SDN controllers to manage virtual and physical networks, (ii) new abstractions for virtual networks and network virtualization, and (iii) new routing algorithms that eliminate limitations of traditional Ethernet routing and allow newer network topologies. Additionally, we present IBMs vision for SDN, describing how these technologies work together to virtualize the underlying physical network infrastructure and automate resource provisioning. The vision includes automated provisioning of multi-tier applications, application performance monitoring, and the enabling of dynamic adaptation of network resources to application workloads. Finally, we explore the implications of SDN on network topologies, quality of service, and middleboxes (e.g., network appliances).

Practical DCB for Improved Data Center Networks

Storage area networking is driving commodity data center switches to support lossless Ethernet (DCB). Unfortunately, to enable DCB for all traffic on arbitrary network topologies, we must address several problems that can arise in lossless networks, e.g., large buffering delays, unfairness, head of line blocking, and deadlock. We propose TCP-Bolt, a TCP variant that not only addresses the first three problems but reduces flow completion times by as much as 70%. We also introduce a simple, practical deadlock-free routing scheme that eliminates deadlock while achieving aggregate network throughput within 15% of ECMP routing. This small compromise in potential routing capacity is well worth the gains in flow completion time. We note that our results on deadlock-free routing are also of independent interest to the storage area networking community. Further, as our hardware testbed illustrates, these gains are achievable today, without hardware changes to switches or NICs.

Shadow MACs: scalable label-switching for commodity ethernet

While SDN promises fine-grained, dynamic control of the network, in practice limited switch TCAM rule space restricts most forwarding to be coarse-grained. As an alternative, we demonstrate that using destination MAC addresses as opaque forwarding labels allows an SDN controller to leverage large MAC (L2) forwarding tables to manage a plethora of fine-grained paths. In this shadow MAC model, the SDN controller can install MAC rewrite rules at the network edge to guide traffic on to intelligently selected paths to balance traffic, avoid failed links, or route flows through middleboxes. Further, by decoupling the network edge from the core, we address many other problems with SDN, including consistent network updates, fast rerouting, and multipathing with end-to-end control.