Background

Novel and higher-quality Internet services fuel an exponential growth of traffic in Internet service providers' transport networks. This leads to a significant increase in resource demand with large variations over time thus requiring more efficient and dynamic operation of future networks. The Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm enables an efficient and dynamic operation of communication networks because a central controller is aware of the complete network state. A current research topic at the IKR explores methods for the reconfiguration of multi-layer transport networks using the SDN paradigm.

Task

Transport networks must be failure tolerant and need to guarantee high availability. The SDN controller ONOS (https://onosproject.org/) provides mechanisms for distributed, high availability setups. In this task, you will design and implement a distributed application for the SDN controller ONOS. This application will allow the reconfiguration of the ONOS-controlled network using algorithms developed at the IKR. The task will comprise the following steps.

Acquired Knowledge and Skills

You will acquire a detailed understanding of software-defined networking and its application. You will gain insight into multi-layer networks and network reconfiguration. In addition, you will gain experience in using an extensive, modular, object-oriented software framework in a distributed environment.