Meanwhile, the underlying tasks of assigning client devices to particular channels and access points are centrally controlled to make the best use of the infrastructure. Where separately owned and managed APs may make poor use of the unlicensed frequencies available in the building, the centrally controlled network can use its universal view to arrange the resources most efficiently.
via Stanford team tries for zippier Wi-Fi in crowded buildings – Network World.
And that network runs on open source. OpenBTS, an all-software cellular transceiver, is at the heart of the network running on that box attached to a treetop. Someday, if those working with the technology have their way, it could do for mobile networks what TCP/IP and open source did for the Internet. The dream is to help mobile break free from the confines of telephone providers’ locked-down spectrum, turning it into a platform for the development of a whole new range of applications that use spectrum “white space” to connect mobile devices of every kind. It could also democratize telecommunications around the world in unexpected ways. Startup Range Networks, the company that developed the open-source software powering the network, has much bigger plans for the technology. It wants to adapt the transceiver to use unlicensed spectrum for small-scale cellular networks all over the world without the need to depend on the generosity of incumbent telecom providers or government regulators.
via Cellular’s open source future is latched to tallest tree in the village | Ars Technica.
OpenBTS is a Unix-based software package that connects to a software-defined radio. On the radio side, it uses the GSM air interface used globally by 2G and 2.5G cellular networks, which makes it compatible with most 2G and 3G handsets. On the backend, it uses a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) “soft-switch” or a software-based private branch exchange (PBX) server to route calls, so it can be integrated with VoIP phone systems.
Today, OpenDaylight is an open source platform for network programmability to enable SDN and create a solid foundation for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) for networks at any size and scale. OpenDaylight software is a combination of components including a fully pluggable controller, interfaces, protocol plug-ins, and applications. The Northbound (programmatic) and Southbound (implementation) interfaces are meant to be clearly defined and documented APIs for network applications.
via OpenDaylight: Open Source Programming to the Software-Defined Network.
OpenDaylight delivered its first developer release, Hydrogen, on February 5th, 2014.
Intel isn’t just pushing Avoton as as low-power solution that’ll compete with products from ARM and AMD, but as the linchpin of a system for software defined networking and software defined storage capability. In a typical network, a switch is programmed to send arriving traffic to a particular location. Both the control plane (where traffic goes) and the data plane (the hardware responsible for actually moving the bits) are implemented in hardware and duplicated in every switch.
Software defined networking replaces this by using software to manage traffic (OpenFlow in the example diagram below) and monitoring it from a central controller. Intel is moving towards such a model and talking it up as an option because it moves control away from specialized hardware baked into expensive routers made by people that aren’t Intel, and towards centralized technology Intel can bake into the CPU itself.
Microsoft announced a solution to the limits of VLANs in the cloud using a new feature that was codeveloped for Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and Windows Azure. This new feature was called Hyper-V Network Virtualization (HNV). This is based on a more general concept called Software Defined Networking (SDN).
via Introduction to Hyper-V Network Virtualization (HNV).
SDN and HNV abstract IP address spaces. This is done using two types of address:
Consumer Address (CA): This is the IP address that the tenant uses in their virtual network. This address is set in the guest OS of the virtual machine as normal; it’s the only address that the tenant is normally aware of.
Provider Address (PA): This is the address that is assigned to the NIC of the virtual switch network to allow virtual machines to communicate at the physical layer.
As far as I can tell from this article a CA is just a private IP and a PA is simply a MAC address, renamed. To the cloud user however none of this should matter. I’m struggling to understand the innovation here. Some of the networking concepts mentioned later in the article seem to add a lot of complexity to the IP layer.
Cisco’s SON technology is part of its Quantum software network management tools that can manage the hodgepodge of small cells and integrate them with the macro network core.
via Light Reading – Cisco Brings SON Innovation to Israel.
I don’t understand how this differs from SDN.
While touring the facility, Tony Hiller, VP of engineering and operations at Peerless, admitted he was skeptical about the hype surrounding SDN and noted that, while Peerless was testing it, no operator was doing it yet at scale.
via Light Reading – Data Center Owners Doubt SDN.
The title might be a bit melodramatic.
The vRouter is a software-based router that runs on server hardware, so it can do other things — routing (duh) or acting as a virtual private network (VPN) gateway, for instance. The attraction to the firewall piece is that cloud customers previously had been building things like firewalls out of Linux components, says John Engates, Rackspace’s CTO.
The concept of software-defined networking has captured the attention of network engineers and the trade press, but very few examples of a live SDN implementation exist. One of those few is Google. The search giant presented details about its SDN network at the 2013 Open Networking Summit. Let’s take a look.
via Inside Google’s Software-Defined Network – Network Computing.
That said, many high-speed switches today use BSD Unix as their basis. While many say that the OCP is starting with a “clean sheet of paper”, the ultimate goal of the project seems to be to give datacenter administrators a “bare metal network switch”. I think it’s likely that BSD will lie at its heart. After all, why reinvent the wheel?
via Open Compute to open source high-end network switches | ZDNet.