Network Operations and Internet Security Lab

Ph.D. student Valas Valancius has been developing the Transit Portal, software that gives services hosted on cloud infrastructures like Amazon EC2 direct control over inbound and outbound traffic.  Different services may have different service requirements: some services may require connectivity that satisfies strict performance requirements (e.g., interactive services or gaming may require low latency or packet loss), while other services might wish to simply use the least expensive connectivity.  Unfortunately, today's cloud providers select the same routes for every service hosted on the cloud infrastructure (effectively doing "one size fits all" routing for all hosted services).

The Transit Portal allows each service hosted in a cloud to perform its own Internet routing.  For more information on Transit Portal, see the full paper, or check out the following articles:

• Technology Review
• IEEE Network

Professor Nick Feamster also blogged about the Transit Portal here.  Lots of information about Transit Portal, including information about how to install a Transit Portal yourself, is available on the GENI project wiki for Transit Portal.

Hyojoon "Joon" Kim and Ankur Nayak presented a next-generation access control system called Resonance at the GENI Engineering Conference at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.   The current Georgia Tech network access control framework is based on complicated network configuration settings, making it difficult for operators to debug the system, to make changes to it, and to implement complicated network policies.

Joon and Ankur have been developing a next-generation version of Georgia Tech's access control framework, based on OpenFlow.  The OpenFlow architecture decouples a network's control framework from individual network devices.  We are using this framework to allow operators to express more complex policies in a higher-level language.  The Resonance access control system is deployed on the Georgia Tech campus in research labs across three buildings.  We are in the process of evaluating this deployment for real users on the network.  A more widespread campus deployment is planned over the course of the coming year.

The video below shows the Resonance system in action.  You can also read a bit more about Resonance:

• In our ACM SIGCOMM workshop paper from last year, which describes the basic design.
• In our IEEE LANMAN invited paper, which describes some of the high-level design philosophy behind Resonance.