1 Experimental Network Management Jennifer Rexford Princeton University

2 Elephant in the Room Networks are hard to manage –More than half the financial cost –And, around half of the outages –But, no where near half of the research Why? –Hairy, and preoccupied with today’s protocols –Evaluating and deploying solutions is hard

3 Clean-Slate Network Management A contradiction in terms? –No, design protocols and mechanisms with management in mind from the beginning –That is, design the “knobs” and “dials” Optimization: tuning the network operation –Select knobs that make optimization tractable –… and have small gap from optimal solutions Tomography: inferring network properties –Select dials for simple inference of properties –… balancing trade-off of accuracy and overhead

4 Evaluating and Deploying New Ideas Theoretical work –Computational complexity vs. optimality gap –Inference accuracy vs. measurement overhead Experimental facilities –Emulab: controlled experiments –VINI: mixture of control and realism Deployment paths –Using legacy protocols to talk to the routers –PC routers running open-source software –Campus networks: eat your own cooking –End host: network troubleshooting tools