THESES SOFTWARE DEFINED NETWORKING - Examensarbete i Linköping

Support and Services, a business area of Saab, supplies a wide range of services and integrated support solutions to customers in defence and on commercial markets for cost-efficient support of systems and platforms throughout their life cycle.

Communication Solutions is responsible for the design of technical and robust solutions and infrastructure utilizing networks, radio, and satellite technologies. We design and implement systems in airborne and land based platforms. We are a team of 55 people, headed from Arboga, with operations in both Järfälla and Linköping.

Modern communication systems are controlled by software. Previously, this software was typically closed-source software with few opportunities to add new features or change its behaviour other than through basic configuration. This is currently changing with concepts such as Software Defined Radio (SDR), Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV).

In SDN, the control and data plane are programmable with open interfaces between them. This shift will in several respects revolutionize how communication systems are developed, tested, deployed and managed. The three theses described below will give students the opportunity to combine their interests in software development and networking to learn more about the technologies which will rule data centres and networks of tomorrow.

Thesis 1: NFV Virtualization platform and chaos engineering

In this thesis you will start with a technical survey of currently available NFV platforms. Based on the findings of this survey, you will build a communication system consisting of multiple nodes of routers, switches and radio emulators completely in software using one of the studied platforms. You will evaluate important aspects of the system, e.g. measure how traffic load effects the behaviour and properties of the system. You will apply chaos engineering to test redundancy features of the communication system.

Thesis 2: Data plane filter

In this thesis you will study and implement control plane functions to perform data plane filtering for a programmable switch. Such filtering functions can for example restrict certain information to flow from a secure network to a less secure network. You will start by doing a technical survey of programmable switches and how these switches can be controlled. Very recently, switches with a programmable data plane using the P4 language have become available and will be a focus for this thesis. You will design and implement filters using the P4 language using a switch emulator. The functionality as well as performance limitations of the emulator shall be evaluated.

Theses 3: SDN for tactical networks

In this thesis you will investigate the application of SDN to tactical networking. Traditionally, network routing functionality is distributed across the network using well defined dynamic routing protocols, where each node coordinates with local peers to build up and maintain a view of the network topology for packet forwarding purposes. Each node incorporates both control plane and data plane (forwarding) functionality. The SDN concept promotes the logical centralisation of the control plane functionality. Each node (switch) still manages the forwarding (and dropping) activity in the data plane, but the control plane functionality is centralised to a single node – the so called controller. OpenFlow is the leading protocol for the interaction between controller and switches. You will build a virtual OpenFlow network using e.g. Mininet and using a selected open source controller (following a survey). You will evaluate performance in a number of different tactical network scenarios. You will evaluate different strategies for minimising network overhead and ensuring network robustness (e.g. recovering from loss of controller).

We believe you are a Computer Science student with an interests in Software-Defined Networking. You have experience in Linux and open source tools for software development.