EE Ph.D. Student Won Best Paper Award
01/14/2010
Categories: In-the-news, Research
best paper award at IEEE Second International Conference on
Communication Systems and Networks (COMSNETS). The paper was entitled
"Coping with Link Failures in Centralized Control Plane
Architectures". The conference had an acceptance rate of 20%. This
paper was coauthored with Dr. Thyaga Nandagopal (Bell Labs,
Alcatel-Lucent Inc US).
The paper focuses on centralized control plane network architectures.
These architectures emphasize on maintaining a centralized control
plane in a network, instead of having routers make their own control
decisions. In such a network routers could be replaced with the
switches that would have the least amount of intelligence available on
them. The control plane functions of these switches could be handled
by a centralized authority such as a general-purpose server that could
be located multiple hops away from the switches. Since the switches do
not have too much intelligence on them, an event like a link failure
could generate routing loops in the network or it could even form
islands where a group of switches lose connectivity with their
controller. The paper proposes an algorithm that mitigates the
adverse effects of a link failure, and prevents the switches from
forwarding unnecessary traffic towards the failed link without
violating the basic premises of having the least amount of
intelligence available on the switches. The performance of this
algorithm was verified by implementing it on a network built with
OpenFlow switches.
Maulik Desai is doing his doctoral research with Prof. Nick Maxemchuk
of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University.