Forwarding Table Entries in Software Defined Networks: Representation and Uses in Network Engineering

<p>Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging architecture that decouples the network control and forwarding functions. In SDN, the functionality of static configuration and routing table in a traditional network has been replaced by forwarding table entries (FTEs). Thus a systematic research on FTE to better monitor traffic and manage networking resources becomes crucial in SDN. There are already some initial works on FTE representation from mathematical/logical perspective. However, they usually concentrate on the abstraction and expression of FTE rather than the applications in real network. Based on existing research, a controller is unable to monitor networking traffic and manage networking resources from a network-wide perspective. To address these challenges, Boolean algebra is chosen and extended in this thesis to examine the relations and manipulations among FTEs together with traffic statistics. Specifically, three SDN applications: i) equivalence evaluation during FTE deployment, ii) non-invasive traffic estimation and iii) anomaly detection, have been proposed and verified with the help of Boolean algebra. All of these applications rely on the mining of the FTEs and their associated statistics, thus no overhead will be introduced to the switch's original packet forwarding functionalities. They can be easily deployed in production networks due to the non-invasive strategy as well as the feasibility and flexibility in real networking scenarios.</p>

Forwarding Table Entries in Software Defined Networks: Representation and Uses in Network Engineering

<p>Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging architecture that decouples the network control and forwarding functions. In SDN, the functionality of static configuration and routing table in a traditional network has been replaced by forwarding table entries (FTEs). Thus a systematic research on FTE to better monitor traffic and manage networking resources becomes crucial in SDN. There are already some initial works on FTE representation from mathematical/logical perspective. However, they usually concentrate on the abstraction and expression of FTE rather than the applications in real network. Based on existing research, a controller is unable to monitor networking traffic and manage networking resources from a network-wide perspective. To address these challenges, Boolean algebra is chosen and extended in this thesis to examine the relations and manipulations among FTEs together with traffic statistics. Specifically, three SDN applications: i) equivalence evaluation during FTE deployment, ii) non-invasive traffic estimation and iii) anomaly detection, have been proposed and verified with the help of Boolean algebra. All of these applications rely on the mining of the FTEs and their associated statistics, thus no overhead will be introduced to the switch's original packet forwarding functionalities. They can be easily deployed in production networks due to the non-invasive strategy as well as the feasibility and flexibility in real networking scenarios.</p>

Construction of multicellular yeast networks using the communication toolkit with variable specificity and attenuation

The key next step in synthetic biology is to extend cellular network engineering to the multicellular level by utilizing cell-cell communication for information processing. To facilitate the implementation of multicellular networks in the most commonly used eukaryotic chassis, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, we developed the yeast communication toolkit (YCTK). This toolkit is based on the fungal mating pathway and contains five pheromone-inducible promoters (response parts), eleven pheromones (α-factors; sender parts), eleven pheromone receptors (Ste2; receiver parts), as well as five Bar1 proteases (suppressor parts). All YCTK parts were thoroughly characterized and are compatible with the commonly used yeast Golden Gate cloning standard. We demonstrated the application of the YCTK by implementing several different logic gate-like population networks. Furthermore, we used this toolkit to investigate the pheromone-receptor promiscuity patterns among different yeast species. This toolkit extends currently available resources for construction of complex multicellular eukaryotic networks with varying degrees of promiscuity and attenuation.

AutoReCon: Neural Architecture Search-based Reconstruction for Data-free Compression

Data-free compression raises a new challenge because the original training dataset for a pre-trained model to be compressed is not available due to privacy or transmission issues. Thus, a common approach is to compute a reconstructed training dataset before compression. The current reconstruction methods compute the reconstructed training dataset with a generator by exploiting information from the pre-trained model. However, current reconstruction methods focus on extracting more information from the pre-trained model but do not leverage network engineering. This work is the first to consider network engineering as an approach to design the reconstruction method. Specifically, we propose the AutoReCon method, which is a neural architecture search-based reconstruction method. In the proposed AutoReCon method, the generator architecture is designed automatically given the pre-trained model for reconstruction. Experimental results show that using generators discovered by the AutoRecon method always improve the performance of data-free compression.

How the Internet Developed

This chapter presents the history of the Internet and associated applications. The Internet grew out of the ARPANET, founded on network engineering ideas such as packet switching and the end-to-end principle. The chapter describes the development of TCP/IP to connect networks by Cerf and Kahn, creating the modern Internet as a permissionless open system which anyone can join without a gatekeeper, allowing it to scale up. The evolution of the governance system of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) is presented. The chapter also describes the development of applications that sit on the Internet platform, including the World Wide Web, linked data, cloud computing, and social media.