Jonathan Lim: Software Defined Networking and Services

Jonathan Lim will be a 4th year Computer Science student at UC
Santa Cruz in the Fall of 2012. He will continue his research with Prof. 
Katia Obraczka with the OpenFlow testbed and SDN services. The project 
involved learning about the new paradigm of networking in which networks 
become programmable. Software-defined networking gives network 
operators a finer-grained controland simplified service deployment over 
the underlying forwarding plane. The separation of the forwarding plane 
and the control plane along with network and forwarding abstractions 
promote network innovation.

Software-defined networking (SDN) is a new paradigm that aim at making 
networks programmable by decoupling network control from the data
forwarding hardware. OpenFlow, a notable SDN protocol, provides an API
that lets a logically centralized control element, called a network 
operating system or "controller", to organize OpenFlow-enabled switches. 
Such abstractions promote network innovation by permitting finer-grained 
control and simplified service deployment over the underlying data plane.
In our work, we examine how SDN can be used to provide customized 
services to users. In order to test and evaluate the performance of such 
services, we create an OpenFlow testbed consisting of OpenFlow-enabled
network elements.