There was another major demonstration of OpenFlow last week at SuperComputing 2009 conference in Portland, Oregon. It was jointly implemented with Ciena Corp.,  a major provider of communications networking equipment, software and services. This was the first demonstration of an OpenFlow implementation on a hybrid packet/circuit switch, in support of the draft experimental extensions to the OpenFlow specification for circuit switches.

As a proof of concept, we built a simple OpenFlow enabled packet and circuit switch network using carrier-class Ciena CoreDirector CI  switches. The CDs natively support the OpenFlow protocol for their packet and circuit switching fabrics. We then built an application in the OpenFlow controller that sets up, modifies and tears down packet and circuit flows on demand and dynamically responds to network congestion. Learn more about the demo in the OFC’10 invited paper on the publications page. Our larger goals and motivations are detailed here.

Thanks to Dan Getachew, Preeti Singh, Lyndon Ong, Jim Archuleta, Puneet Gupta, Ashok Kumar, Ritesh Ralhan and the rest of the Ciena development team, as well as Yiannis Yiakoumis, KK Yap, and Vinesh Gudla from the Stanford side. Thanks also to  the Ciena Marketing and Sales teams for putting together the demo booths, material  and other support — it was good to see the buzz the demo created in the Research & Educational Networks (REN) community.

Photo Gallery: SC09

See the Demo Video

We had another major demo of OpenFlow today at the GENI Engineering Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah. The demo showed the use of a GENI Clearing House to reserve a virtual network slice across OpenFlow Networks at Stanford University, across the Internet2 Backbone and at Princeton University.

It was great to see that now a small number of projects inside GENI are making progress towards becoming deployable systems. Compliments to Rob Ricci’s demo of ProtoGENI which was very well done.

The evening before the major demo at the plenary, we also exhibited at the demo session that was held in the tower of the Rice Eccles Stadium. Thanks to Rob Sherwood, Srini Seetharaman, Jad Naous,  Masayoshi Kobayahsi, Sapan Bhatia, Tony Mack, and Andy Bavier for the hard work that it took to make this happen. It was worth it!

Photo Gallery: GEC6

OpenRoads (a.k.a. OpenFlow Wireless) won the best poster at SIGCOMM this year.  This platform can be thought of as the wireless extensions of OpenFlow.  The OpenRoads platform has been developed to support our vision for the future mobile Internet (as described in a technical report “Blueprint for Introducing Innovation into the Wireless Networks we use every day“).  Our long term goal is for others to innovate in their production wireless network using OpenFlow.

The OpenRoads Team

n-casting between WiFi-WiMAX using OpenRoads is an example of our vision.  It was also part of SIGCOMM’s best demonstration.  An improved demonstration was shown in Mobicom and won honorable mention.  This demonstration has been shown in several other occasions, such as the OpenFlow workshop at Stanford.  If you have not yet seen the demonstration, a video of it is available on this website.

Now you are also able to reproduce this demonstration.  We are proud to make this demonstration available to the community.  This includes instructions for the physical setup and streaming server.  We have also made available the source code for the network controller, wireless client and visualization.  More importantly, we make OpenFlow Wireless available to public, to promote innovation in the wireless networks we use every day.

n-casting and OpenFlow Wireless are made available to you by the team pictured above, with the help of many others.