ALIEN is co-organizing European Workshop on Software Defined Networking (EWSDN 2014) together with the FP7 project UNIFY. The workshop will be held in Budapest, Hungary between September 1st and September 3rd, 2014.
Call for Demos and Posters for EWSDN 2014 is open with a deadline on 5 July.
For more information visit: http://www.ewsdn.eu/
The 3rd ALIEN project meeting took place on 3-5 February at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain.
The meeting was primarily devoted to WP1, WP6 and WP5, with some additional discussion on FIA Athens 2014 ALIEN presence and the ALIEN Workshop at EWSDN 2014. The project amendment has been discussed and agreed among all partners. Last day was dedicated to the software development meeting, with a focus on WP3 and AMsoil.
ALIEN will deliver an innovative network abstraction mechanism targeting the control and management convergence and interoperability of heterogeneous network elements building strong foundations for Software Defined Networks.
Figure 1 – ALIEN architecture overview
To achieve this, ALIEN proposes to adopt the concept of Network Operating System (NOS), a distributed system running on top the hybrid, heterogeneous network infrastructure, which creates a global view of the network elements and their capability.
The NOS of ALIEN will be based on control and management framework of OFELIA FIRE facility. ALIEN will extend OpenFlow control framework of OFELIA and its architecture to support abstraction of network information of equipment that are alien to the OpenFlow technology such as optical network elements, legacy layer2 switches, network processors and programmable hardware (FPGA). Building on its novel NOS, ALIEN introduces the concept of the control program paradigm, which operates on the global view of the network. and support new network technologies in layer0, layer1 and layer 2 both in core and access.
The NOS of ALIEN utilizes a novel hardware description language as well as a functional abstraction mechanism for uniform representation of any type of network hardware and their capabilities/functionalities that doesn’t support OpenFLow (i.e. alien hardware). The language will describe capabilities of hardware, input and output signal format, and topology information to describe the pipelining of actions on specific hardware. The abstraction mechanism will hide hardware complexity as well as technology and vendor specific features from OpenFlow control framework.
ALIEN project aims to experimentally verify its solution for describing network device capabilities and controlling its forwarding behaviour of all OpenFlow and non-OpenFlow capable hardware simultaneously.
In summary, ALIEN is:
