”We want to develop a next generation open source PC-based router”
LICENTIATE INTERVIEW
Voravit Tanyingyong came to KTH School of Information and Communication Technology for master studies. After his graduation he continued with doctoral studies and now he has defended his licentiate thesis “Performance and Reliability in Open Router Platforms for Software-Defined Networking”.
Where are you from and where did you study before coming to KTH?
– I am from Thailand. I received a Bachelor of Computer Science at Thammasat University in Thailand and a Master of Science at KTH School of Information and Communication Technology.
What is your topic and why did you choose it?
– My thesis title is “Performance and Reliability in Open Router Platforms for Software-Defined Networking”. My supervisors Peter Sjödin, Markus Hidell and I actually started our research from what we called flow-based networking – a networking scheme that makes forwarding decision based on flows. Since Software-Deifned Networking (SDN) is already doing a similar thing as our idea, we adopt it into our research. So, our goal is to incorporate flow-based networking into an open source router in an SDN context. Within the scope of my licentiate, we try to address challenges related to SDN data plane operation in software on open source PC-based routers including performance and reliability aspects.
Describe your topic in short.
– We want to develop a next generation open source PC-based router that supports SDN. So, we design and implement our prototype using open source software and standard PC components. Open source software solution is flexible but it has some limitations, so we are trying to improve it in two aspects, namely performance and reliability.
Tell us something about your results.
– The results are good. We demonstrate that open router platforms with support for SDN can be built using open source software with commodity-off-the-shelf hardware component. We achieve significant throughput improvement by offloading the packet lookup task to a standard PC network card. We also investigate fast failure detection and propose a simple mechanism to make it reliable.
What will the future bring for your research, how will you continue and what focus will you have on your PhD thesis?
– SDN opens up possibility for new innovations and improvements in the network. Currently, we are interested in energy-efficient networking. So, we will try to work on this in an SDN context.