- Redesigning the mobile packet core using the concepts of
NFV and SDN. The packet core in the current mobile data
networks (4G / LTE) is inflexible and ill-suited to scale to future
applications. As a result, there have been several proposals to
rearchitect the mobile core by redesigning some of the hardware-based
network nodes as software running on a virtual machine / cloud (this
process is called NFV, or Network Function Virtualization), and by
separating control function from data forwarding functions into a
separate centralized software controller (called SDN, or
software-designed networking). This seminar will study some of these
proposals. This topic will also require reading up and understanding
how mobile data telecom networks work today.
We are in the process of building simple prototypes of the LTE packet
core components (network functions) in our group, using principles of
NFV and SDN. Students doing this seminar will likely work on building
upon this code for future MTP projects.
Prerequisites: interest and aptitude for systems research;
good performance in CS641.
- Techniques to improve network I/O performance in
virtualized and multi-core systems. Networking applications
face several inefficiences when running on multicore systems,
especially within a virtual machine. For example, several threads that
process the network packets have to contend for access to a shared
socket, and other shared data structures. Further, the packets are
copied several times across guest and host OSes before they can reach
the application. Several papers and techniques have been proposed to
overcome these limitations. For example, systems built upon Intel
DPDK, netmap, multi-core friendly networking stacks etc. The goal of
this seminar is to understand these ideas in detail.
This seminar is expected to lead to MTP projects that build these
ideas into a real application (e.g., the LTE packet core network
functions) and demonstrate performance improvements.
Prerequisites: interest and aptitude for systems research; good
performance in CS641 and CS695.
- Designing horizontally scalable network
applications. This topic will cover several papers and
techniques that help us build horizontally scalable network
applications. There are several issues to be considered in designing
horizontally scalable applications. For example, one needs to
carefully design the network application itself so that it can operate
as multiple replicas, while keeping the shared state consistent. One
should also carefully steer the traffic to the right replica. We will
read several papers that cover all such issues.
This seminar is expected to lead to MTP projects that build these
ideas into a real application (e.g., take the existing LTE packet core
prototype and make it scalable).
Prerequisites: interest and aptitude for systems research; good
performance in CS641.
- Web server overload management. This seminar will
read up on more papers that solve the problem of web server
overload. We have been building a system (WebQ, see recent publication
on my webpage) to help web users avoid seeing a web server crash
during server overload. This seminar is expected to lead to an MTP
that builds on the existing WebQ system and make it more realistic and
practical.
Prerequisites: interest and aptitude for systems research; good
performance in CS641.