Jennifer Rexford
Closing the Loop: Network Control in the Data Plane
Abstract
The proliferation of communication services that we depend on every day makes managing computer networks more important than ever. The increasing security, availability, and performance demands of these services suggest that these network-management problems must be solved in real time and inside the network. In this new era, network management requires a fundamentally new approach. Instead of performing offline analysis of network traces, future networks need to make real-time, closed-loop decisions to block unwanted traffic, to reroute traffic to avoid congestion, and more. This talk explores how to bring together network measurement, analysis, and control, by leveraging recent advances in programmable network devices and the P4 programming language (www.p4.org). We present several example network "apps" that detect and fix performance and security problems, while still processing packets at line rate in high-speed switches with limited memory. We also discuss our deployment experience with network telemetry P4 applications using Barefoot Tofino switches in the Princeton campus network.
Bio
Jennifer joined the Computer Science Department at Princeton University in February 2005 after eight and a half years at AT&T Research. Her research focuses on Internet routing, network measurement, and network management, with the larger goal of making data networks easier to design, understand, and manage. Jennifer is co-author of the book Web Protocols and Practice: HTTP/1.1, Networking Protocols, Caching, and Traffic Measurement (Addison-Wesley, May 2001) and co-editor of She's an Engineer? Princeton Alumnae Reflect (Princeton University, 1993, see recent talk about the book). Jennifer served as the chair of ACM SIGCOMM from 2003 to 2007, and has served on the ACM Council, the board of the Computing Research Association, the advisory council of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering directorate at NSF, and the Computing Community Consortium. She received her BSE degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1991, and her MSE and PhD degrees in computer science and electrical engineering from the University of Michigan in 1993 and 1996, respectively. She was the winner of ACM's Grace Murray Hopper Award for outstanding young computer professional of the year for 2004.