Collaborative Research Project within the 7th Framework Programme (FP7) of the European Commission

Partners :

Eurescom, Germany
NEC Europe Ltd., UK
Deutsche Telekom, Germany
University College London, UK
Lancaster University, UK
Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium
Technische Universität Berlin, Germany
Universitatea Politehnica Bucuresti, Romania
Dreamlab Technologies, Switzerland
Nextworks, Italy
Universita`di Pisa, Italy

October 2010 to September 2013

The CHANGE project addresses a central problem of today’s Internet: its size and scope make innovation through the introduction of new core network technologies very difficult. The Internet suffers from "ossification". Even minor changes only happen through the accretion of point solutions that embed knowledge in the network, optimizing today's applications at the expense of tomorrow's.

The goal of CHANGE is to reinvigorate innovation on the Internet, in order to better support current services and applications and enable those of tomorrow. This will be achieved by introducing a common concept of a flow-processing platform, instantiated at critical points in the network. Although the platform and its interfaces are common, the processing performed must be programmable, allowing the network to evolve and support the needs of rapidly changing applications. Such platforms can be built from commodity hardware – e.g. x86 servers and commodity switching chipsets –, and are both scalable and powerful while retaining the flexibility to quickly introduce processing primitives.

These platforms form the basis for CHANGE, but the vision is larger. The goal is an architecture that combines multiple communicating flow processing platforms to provide innovative end-to-end services to applications. Thus, conventional traffic flows can be processed at varying degrees of granularity, and application-specific virtual network overlays can be constructed, without impacting other network services or traffic. The aim is to do this within an architectural framework that allows application developers and network operators to reason about the emergent end-to-end behavior. To validate the architecture, we will implement and deploy a set of novel and diverse applications and services.

As technical coordinator, NEC leads the design, development and implementation of the flow processing platforms as well as the architecture and protocols used to communicate between them in order to achieve end-to-end services. Further, NEC will lead the work package on dissemination.

Flow Processing Platforms

CHANGE will seek to reinvigorate innovation on the Internet by introducing flow-processing platforms at critical points in the network. The platform hosts flow processing capabilities and an overriding consideration is performance. The required performance will usually be achieved by realizing a platform as a set of locally interconnected and managed physical components, such as commodity hardware, special purpose middle-boxes and interconnection equipment. As a proof of concept, we propose to develop and build a processing platform based on modern commodity server hardware (whose performance is now suitable for high-speed flow processing) and Openflow switches (which natively support various granularities for flow definition); NEC has experience in both of these, having been involved in the vrouters project which made extensive use of servers for network processing and as a manufacturer of Openflow switches. In addition, NEC will lead the development of the platform controller which will handle requests for flow processing, as well as mapping and instantiating these onto the available hardware resources in such a way that resource utilization is maximized while meeting acceptable performance requirements.

Inter-platform Communication and Services

Coming up soon.

Official CHANGE Web Site coming up soon.