Tag Archives: Conet

Dissemination, Cooperation, and Standardization

The Disseminate and publish activity is responsible for propagate and ensure the high visibility of the project results across related research communities.

This activity aims towards four specific goals:

To ensure the project is known outside the ALIEN consortium
To facilitate integration with other European projects
To cooperate with related international and national projects on OpenFlow and Future Internet architectures and protocols
Initiate, promote, and coordinate related standardization activities in relevant bodies

Firstly the strategy and dissemination plan for project have been published. It contains a list of workshops, presentations, conferences, journals, posters, etc. where ALIEN project participants plan show their results to other scientific environments from all the world (the participation in conferences and meetings in the USA, Japan, Europe is planned).

Secondly the project website has been launched and is up to date with all news from ALIEN consortium. Also project promotion materials has been created in this activity.

Thirdly ALIEN project has started cooperation in SDN and Open Flow domain with project CONET and FELIX. This activity creates an opportunity to develop solutions based on CONET and extend the range of ALIEN recipients with the opportunity to join the initiative FELIX.

Fourthly ALIEN, providing a new solutions and ideas can bring a new standard for the future commercial solutions. That is why we cooperate with a standardization bodies and standardization working groups like ONF, OMG, IEEE or Open Compute Foundation. Our ideas could show a new direction or could modify current approach to switching and routing devices.

Besides above ALIEN project has promoted the ideas during organized workshops. Workshops allows project partners to improve qualification in some technology used in ALIEN project. Also, such events are a great opportunity to exchange experience with people know new devices very well. In many cases these people are designers and creators of these devices what gives a huge opportunity to learn “directly from the source” and thinking in a way designers do. Such workshops have been addressed not only for project partners. They have been open for all people and companies not involved in our project.

More information

D6.1: Report on the dissemination plan for the first year of the project (NOT PUBLIC)
D6.1: Report on the dissemination plan for the first year of the project – updated (NOT PUBLIC)
D6.3: Report on the dissemination activities in the first year of the project (NOT PUBLIC)

Experiments on OFELIA

The Experiments on OFELIA activity is responsible for running the experiments over the OFELIA FIRE experimental facility, in order to test and demonstrate ALIEN HAL concept.

This activity aims towards five specific goals:

Definition of requirements of the Content-Centric Networking (CCN) usage scenario
OFELIA slice deployment and CCN basic scenario setup
Adaptation of the CCN application layer to an OpenFlow environment
Integration of alien hardware developments over the OFELIA slice
Validation of developments and experimental-driving research reporting activity

First of all, this activity is responsible for the integration and validation of all ALIEN developments:

HAL agnostic part (see Hardware Abstraction Layer)
HAL hardware specific parts for all ALIEN platforms (i.e.: ATCA, DOCSIS, Dell/Force10 switch, EZappliance, GEPON, L0 switch, NetFPGA)
CCN solution for research-driven experimentations (i.e.: CONET solution)

Experiments development

The experiments performed by this activity combines CCN with OpenFlow using the existing work from the COntent NETwork (CONET) project. The ALIEN project is actively contributing to the CONET development in cooperation with the team that is currently supporting the code. Due to the fact that the ALIEN project deals with OpenFlow, the ALIEN consortium focuses mainly on the OpenFlow related part of the CONET development (i.e. the FloodLight controller modules). Currently, some areas CONET for enhancement have been identified (see Fig.1) and agreed between ALIEN and CONET teams:

multiple-cache server support
topology-aware path computation

Figure 1 – ALIEN improvements to the current CONET development

Testbed

The CCN experiments based on CONET solution are performed within an ALIEN slice created in OFELIA testbed (see Fig.2). The ALIEN slice includes both computational resources (e.g. end-nodes, CONET nodes and OpenFlow controller), ALIEN hardware platforms and OpenFlow devices from the pool of resources provided by OFELIA.

Figure 2 – ALIEN slice topology within OFELIA FIRE testbed

Usage scenarios

Currently, ALIEN defined four use-cases which will be used to test whether the implementation of OpenFlow has been successful on the ALIEN hardware and the utility of OpenFlow in networking scenarios:

base scenario (without ALIEN improvements)
split routing scenario (see Fig. 3)
cache assisted scenario (extra cache nodes are used)
combined scenario (combines both split routing and multiple cache scenarios)

Figure 3 – Alternative routes scenario for ALIEN experimentation