Understand. Innovate. Transform – Make an Impact on Global Networks.
With the GENI project advancing smoothly into Spiral 4, many key projects were highlighted at GEC 12 during the Experiments Plenary at the twelfth GENI Engineering Conference (GEC12) in Kansas City on November 3, 2011.
Leading researchers presented live demonstrations of their experiments to two hundred ninety five attendees. Experiments built on the unique capabilities of the GENI mesoscale deployment, a prototype distributed virtual laboratory for exploring future internets, currently spanning over a dozen university campuses and backbone points of presence across the US. Using GENI’s capabilities of slicing and deep programmability, experimenters were able to deploy and validate novel services and applications, many of which are not realizable in today’s internet.
One group of experiments focused on taking advantage of server and cloud resources to provide new and more efficient capabilities to end users of home networks and mobile devices. Researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology demonstrated uCap, a tool that works with a specialized home router to permit home users to manage network usage allocations across family members, applications (browsing, e-mail, video streaming), and devices. The University of Wisconsin used a suite of chess-playing smart phones to show how computationally intensive tasks can be offloaded to heterogeneous cloud resources while meeting users’ goals for security and power efficiency. The Infinity project at the University of Michigan integrates energy-efficient wireless communication techniques and predictive caching to optimize performance of smart phone applications such as Facebook photo sharing.
In a collaborative effort with the SC11 SCInet Research Sandbox (SRS), another group of experiment teams highlighted novel in-network capabilities that build upon GENI’s deeply programmable network resources. Researchers from Northwestern University showed how advanced programmable networks can shortcut years of custom engineering to bring ad hoc specialized networks to individuals and organizations. Indiana University gave attendees a live view of their FlowScale system, which balances multi-gigabit network loads across the campus’ multiple intrusion detection system (IDS) servers, an integral part of the University’s network operations. A combined team from Indiana University and the University of Delaware used their eXtensible Session Protocol (XSP) to boost performance by seamlessly connecting GENI-enabled resources at the network edge to core routers running a high-performance transfer protocol. Clemson University researchers showed off their Steroid OpenFlow Service, transparently tuning network performance to increase end-to-end TCP transfer rates by two orders of magnitude.
Finally, a team led by Rutgers WINLAB showed how they are using the GENI mesoscale deployment to deploy, test, and validate their MobilityFirst architecture. MobilityFirst is sponsored by the National Science Foundation under its Future Internet Architecture program. Using new protocols and design paradigms, MobilityFirst is developing a novel architecture for a future internet where mobility is the norm, with dynamic host and network mobility at scale. Two key MobilityFirst capabilities, Storage Aware Routing and the Global Name Resolution Service, were demonstrated with wired and two different wireless connectivity modalities across a nationwide GENI slice covering eight campuses, two national network backbones, and nine backbone points of presence.
GENI at a Glance PDF with GENI FAQs