ARO Workshop on Software Defined Networking for Army Applications

SNLab organized the workshop in May 5-6$^{th}$, 2016. This workshop bring together experts from software-defined networking, wireless/hybrid networks, tactical networks, high-performance computing and related disciplines to investigate both the benefits and the issues when applying SDN to army applications. The emergence of SDN, whose key features include separation between the data-plane and the control-plane of networks, and logically centralized network control, has potential to completely reshape the field of computer networking. Going beyond conceptual models, the existing deployment of SDN in major data centers (e.g., Google and Microsoft data centers) has demonstrated the substantial gain and flexibility of SDN. However, the existing initiatives of SDN focus mostly on non-tactical data center networks, service provider networks, and enterprise networks. Given the substantial potential of SDN, it is imperative that we develop a better understanding of both the impacts and the potential issues of applying SDN to Army Applications, primarily for multi-hop wireless/hybrid networks, but also for high performance computing in the army context.

We invited some famous professors and scientists to discuss some SDN challenge problem, including Yale, UCLA, Imperial College, University of Pennsylvania, Caltech, Carnegie Mellon University, Princeton University, MIT, DARPA, IBM, Uber etc. famous university and company.

Y. Richard Yang as a chair , made a key note speech. And he introduced some recently research. A key benefit of SDN is logically centralized control. There is a large body of existing work of SDN control path, but they are mostly in the context of wired networks such as data center networks and wide-area networks (WAN). By control path, we mean the complete spectrum from controller placement, controller fault tolerance, controller programming, and controller-forwarding elements integration.

This workshop reviewed key related work and warmly discussed issues with potential outcomes. The workshop successful hold and all of attendees are very satisfied with the outcome of the workshop.