CBL - Campus del Baix Llobregat

Projecte

Títol: SDN-based network synchronization testbed


Director/a: RINCÓN RIVERA, DAVID

Departament: ENTEL

Títol: SDN-based network synchronization testbed

Data inici oferta: 19-07-2019     Data finalització oferta: 19-03-2020



Estudis d'assignació del projecte:
    DG ENG AERO/SIS TEL
    DG ENG AERO/TELEMÀT
    DG ENG SISTE/TELEMÀT
    GR ENG SIS TELECOMUN
    GR ENG SIST AEROESP
    GR ENG TELEMÀTICA
    MU AEROSPACE S&T 15
    MU DRONS
    MU MASTEAM 2015
Tipus: Individual
 
Lloc de realització: EETAC
 
Segon director/a (UPC): SALLENT RIBES, SEBASTIÀ
 
Paraules clau:
SDN, Synchronization, clock, PTP, Synchronous Ethernet
 
Descripció del contingut i pla d'activitats:
A key aspect in modern telecommunication networks is the need of distributing a clock that syncronizes the equipment. This is critical in certain cases such as mobile networks (3G, 4G and even more importantly in 5G), where the base stations are perfectly synchronized in order to carry out handovers, and also because the modulation or the access technology (the case of OCDMA) reqires strict timing. Passive Optical Networks (PON) used in FTTH (Fiber-to-the-Home) are another case, because they rely on TDM access shared among several users.

The main trend today in networking is Software Defined Networking (SDN), where the traditional architecture based on distributed algorithms (routing, for example) is replaced by a centralized controller able to optimize the network in several ways (traffic engineering, power-saving, etc). More details at SDN (Wikipedia)

That is why we are working on a SDN-based architecture for the management and operation of the clock distribution in mobile and PON networks. Raúl Suárez, an EETAC alumni, focused his Bachelor and Master degree Theses in this aspect, and even published a paper:

R. Suárez, Bachelor Degree Thesis, “Design, implementation and evaluation of synchronous ethernet in an SDN architecture”, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, May 2015

R. Suárez, D. Rincón, S. Sallent, "Extending OpenFlow for SDN-enabled synchronous Ethernet networks," Proceedings of the 2015 1st IEEE Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft), London, 2015, pp. 1-6.

R. Suárez, Master Thesis, “Design of a control and management system for frequency- and time-synchronous SDN networks”, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, June 2016

Surprisingly, there are few researchers working in this area (as far as we know, only the Technion in Israel; see for example
T. Mizrahi, Y. Moses, “Software-Defined Networks: It’s about time”, Proceedings of INFOCOM 2016, although their approach is different to ours - they want to synchronize updates of network confirguration, we want to synchronize the equipment itself)

The goals of the Master Thesis are:

1) To set up a testbed, based on Raul's implementation, and real equipment. We own 40-some MicroTik routers, 2 NetFPGA-based routers, together with a couple of Synchronous Ethernet -compatible SFP switch ports, and a GPS clock source that can play the Master role. We also own several Rapsberry Pi and other small devices that can act as clients of the network.

2) To design and carry on extensive testing of the functional and performance evaluation of the testbed, and analyze the results.

3) To prepare a paper to be submitted to a journal or conference.




 
Orientació a l'estudiant:
 
 
 
Horari d'atenció a estudiants per a l'assignació de projecte:

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