How Should the Internet Evolve?




Nick McKeown

Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Stanford University

Huang Engineering Center, Room 300
Stanford University
Friday, November 12, 2010

Abstract

The first 40 years of the Internet were full of limitless possibility. A simple unchanging architecture meant rapid deployment, and allowed new applications to flourish on top. With success came legacy, which for the Internet infrastructure meant very slow change. Today, the architecture is essentially the same as it was in the beginning. While many great ideas have been published to fix some of the Internet's shortcomings (e.g. mobility, security, reliability, and so on), there has been almost no path to transfer technology. In this talk I'll describe work to try to add a prototyping "feature" to the existing Internet, allowing experimentation to ride for free on the coat-tails of existing and new production networks. This approach is sometimes referred to as "Software Defined Networks", or networks with a split architecture between the packet datapath and the control plane, with well-defined open interfaces. It appears that several parts of the network are heading the same way, starting with data center networks, and enterprise WiFi. In this talk I'll describe the origins of the approach, how it is being deployed, and where it might lead.

Speaker Bio

Nick McKeown (PhD/MS UC Berkeley '95/'92; B.E Univ. of Leeds, '86) is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Faculty Director of the Clean Slate Program at Stanford University. From 1986-1989 he worked for Hewlett-Packard Labs in Bristol, England. In 1995, he helped architect Cisco's GSR 12000 router. In 1997 McKeown co-founded Abrizio Inc. (acquired by PMC-Sierra), where he was CTO. He was co-founder and CEO of Nemo ("Network Memory"), which is now part of Cisco.

Prof. McKeown is the STMicroelectronics Faculty Scholar, the Robert Noyce Faculty Fellow, a Fellow of the Powell Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and recipient of a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation. In 2000, he received the IEEE Rice Award for the best paper in communications theory. McKeown is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (UK), the IEEE and the ACM. In 2005, he was awarded the British Computer Society Lovelace Medal, and in 2009 the IEEE Kobayashi Computer and Communications Award. McKeown's research interests include the architecture of the future Internet, tools and platforms for networking teaching and research.

9.16.2010 dmm