Networking as a Cloud Service

Project logistics

Mentor: Da Yu email: da_yu-at-brown dot edu
Min-max team size: 3-5
Expected project hours per week (per team member): 8 hours
Will the project be open source? Yes

Preferred past experience

Python (Very important)
Concepts and Protocols of computer networks (L2, L3 and L4) (Valuable)
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) (Nice to have)
Linux
Git

Project Overview

The Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC) is envisioned as a public cloud marketplace in which multiple parties, instead of only a single provider, can participate in implementing and operating the cloud. In this project we investigate how to enable networking to be offered by multiple providers, much like there can be multiple compute and storage providers that offer competing services to tenants. In this model, tenants can not only rent out hardware resources like compute and storage from different hardware providers, but also can provision network resources with different characteristics from different physical network providers. To achieve that, we aim to create a network architecture that enables multiple parallel physical infrastructures managed by different network providers, exposed through a market. This novel network architecture and the marketplace bring both tenants and network providers benefits:

Tenants can get better network services with lower costs
Network providers can set different policies to compete with each other

The goals of this project are:

Prototype a network architecture that enables multiple network providers. This has several components:
1. How characteristics of the different networks are exposed to tenants
2. How tenants can request specific network characteristics
3. How, once selected, specific traffic from tenants can be routed through specific providers
Potentially integrate with the HaaS provisioning of the MOC
Evaluate various aspects of the resulting system

This project will involve some design work, as well as the development of working proofs of concept and prototypes. The first part to be done is part c, parts a and b form the infrastructure of the marketplace itself. Outside of the scope of this project is the algorithms providers use to decide on offers, and the algorithms tenants use to select offers. We will provide a toy implementation of part c as a starting point.

Some Technologies you will learn/use:

Mininet (virtual network emulator) and OVS
Ryu (an SDN controller)
VLAN, MPLS, DSCP