Theophilus Benson

"Systematic Approach to Managing Software Defined Networks"

( MPI-SWS talk in Kooperation mit dem Fachbereich Informatik)

Software-defined Networks and programmable data-planes represent a shift in networking paradigm, which enables novel applications. Despite the growing interest and adoption of SDNs, SDNs remain plagued with availability and performance problems.In this talk, I discuss recent and ongoing work by my group to analyze these paradigms and create systematic abstractions that provide control over performance and availability. First, I will discuss Tardis a system that improves fault tolerance by leveraging the novel programmability provided by SDNs to identify and transform the failure-inducing event(s). Second, I will discuss a pair of projects, Hermes and SCC, that revisits traditional storage principles and applies them to network updates. Through this work, I will demonstrate how the centralization and programmability offered by SDNs enables us to more systematically reason about traditional networking issues such as availability and performance.

Bio: Theo is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Brown University. His group works on designing frameworks and algorithms for solving practical networking problems with an emphasis on speeding up the internet, improving network reliability, and simplifying network management. He has won multiple awards including best paper awards, an applied network research prize, various Yahoo! and Facebook Faculty Awards, and an NSF Career award.