Programmable Networking and Applications

Speaker: Pravein Govindan Kannan

Abstract

Over the past few years, programmable networks have revolutionized networking by providing abstractions to program the control-plane and data-plane of networks. In this talk, I will be giving a brief introduction to programmable networks, and how it can be useful in designing : 1) 5G Fronthaul Slicing Architecture (FSA) which runs in the switch data plane and uses information from the wireless schedule to identify the slice of a fronthaul data packet at line-rate. It enables multipoint-to-multipoint routing as well as packet prioritization to provide multiplexing gains in the fronthaul and the C-RAN, making the system more scalable. 2) A better network debugger which enables visibility, retrospection and correlation to debug transient network issues and achieving network-level observability.Finally, I will be briefly talk about the current challenges in achieving end-to-end observability in microservices based applications which are typically deployed as containers and connected using multiple Container Network Interfaces (CNI).

Bio

Pravein is a Research Scientist at IBM Research India (IRL). His research interests are areas surrounding Networking, Data Center Networks and Cloud. Prior to joining IRL, he obtained his PhD from National University of Singapore (NUS). He has published several papers in top-tier conferences like SIGCOMM, NSDI, MOBICOM, Sensys, etc. His research has been recognized with the best paper award at ACM SOSR 2019 and Facebook research award.