SwitchWare: Lessons learned, and where next?

December 19, 2006
Jonathan Smith | University of Pennsylvania

The SwitchWare project proposed to accelerate network evolution by Introducing programmable nodes into the network, enabling innovations to be introduced by network operators or even network users. An approach balancing flexibility, extensibility, security and performance was pursued using OCaml, resulting in the ALIEN architecture, which permitted construction of an incrementally deployed network element, the Active Bridge. ALIEN also enabled the construction of domain-specific languages such as PLAN and SNAP which explored different regions of the design space such as ‘active packets’, and infrastructures such as the AEGIS secure bootstrap necessary to support its programming-language based security model.

SwitchWare demonstrated the value of using modern programming language technologies to concurrently achieve flexibility, extensibility, security and performance. At the same time, modern languages presented a deployment challenge, due to platform availability, user base, and applications base. Deployment in some settings may remain a challenge, but a decade of technology maturation may now permit these ideas to be used in environments such as programmable edge routers to support rapid deployment of new services, e.g., for mobile edge devices.

Speaker Details

Jonathan M. Smith is the Olga and Alberico Pompa Professor of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania, to which he has recently returned after almost three years at DARPA. He was previously at Bell Telephone Laboratories, and Bellcore, which he joined at the AT&T divestiture. His current research interests rangefrom programmable network infrastructures and cognitive radios toarchitectures for computer augmented immune response.