The complexity of network management is widely recognized as one of the biggest challenges facing the Internet today. Network operators are under tremendous pressure to make their networks highly reliable to avoid service disruptions. Yet, operators often need to change the network to upgrade faulty equipment, deploy new services, and install new routers. Unfortunately, changes cause disruptions, forcing a trade-off between the benefit of the change and the disruption it will cause. We argue that many network-management problems stem from the same root causes - the need to maintain consistency between the physical and logical configuration of the routers and the static coupling of router state and functionality to specific router instances. Hence, we propose two new network-management primitives where (i) (virtual) routers are allowed to freely move from one physical router to another, and (ii) parts of a router can be seamlessly removed from one router and merged into another without any disruption. In addition to simplifying existing network-management tasks like planned maintenance and service deployment, these primitives can also help tackle emerging challenges such as reducing energy consumption and can even be applied to traffic management. In this talk I will present the design and implementation of our modified router to incorporate these two primitives.

Eric Keller is a 4th year Ph.D. student in the Electrical Engineering department at Princeton University. He is actively working on network virtualization under the guidance of Jennifer Rexford in the Computer Science department. Prior to Princeton, Eric worked for 7 years at Xilinx, a semiconductor company that makes FPGAs.  For details, see Eric's home page.