Accelerating Internet Evolution

Evolving services such as cloud computing and video are growing the demand for bandwidth and pushing the limits on routing protocols. Innovation in protocols, systems design, and even network architectures is growing, mostly from independent players, academia and some service providers. Unfortunately, these projects are developed often without industry input and often don’t flow to end-users – ie service providers. When it does flow, customers are usually reluctant to test these new innovations in their labs or do not have significant development resources to deploy these innovations.  Instead they wait for equipment vendors to consider incorporating these innovations into their own systems, which takes time and money.

Equipment vendors in turn, cannot adapt quickly to support these new innovations because of proprietary hardware, closed software stacks, and their own roadmaps and deadlines.

OSR’s “platform” will facilitate a stable and on-going feature rich base of Quagga. This will foster innovation, fast development and deployment of routing protocol innovations into trial or production networks, without the bottleneck of incumbent equipment vendors.

The following are a few examples of some new innovative projects/features requiring strong routing code, which has been qualified, with 24×7 support, giving service providers the confidence to deploy them in their labs or production networks.

• OpenFlow – an open standard enabling the development of cost effective switching and routing solutions with a standard open control interface. Openflow requires routing code to forward packets

• ALTO – Is a protocol enabling the use of network resources while maintaining or improving application performance. Mostly content delivery systems will use this protocol. ALTO requires a hook into routing protocol enabling proper deployment of a service.

• Software Defined Networks – Enabling applications to control the network configuration (using Openflow, ALTO, etc) for optimal performance, low latency requires a strong routing code base.

These projects over time provide the basis for improvement and/or evolution of the existing network architecture. A majority of the components supporting this architecture will utilize

• Commercial off the shelf hardware – Over the last decade+, ASICs and CPUs have evolved (Moore’s Law) to provide capabilities equivalent or even better than proprietary equivalents in most equipment vendors systems available today. In addition, these components are cheaper, and more energy efficient. Hence its highly likely that a majority of the HW utilized in these next generation Internet solutions will use COTs HW.

• Open source software – Precisely what OSR is helping drive with Quagga at layer 3. Others also exist at different layers and for different functions. Another example, is Openflow – enabling an alternative system/network architecture interconnecting multiple systems together. Open source software will enable COTs based systems to work as well as or even better than existing equipment vendor’s systems. In addition, with OSS, faster customization and deployment also exists.

The combination of COTs, and OSS, will drive new systems in network architectures. These systems will reside at any and all locations in the network.

Quagga with OSR will help drive these new components and architectures, bring forth a better, more efficient evolution of Internet Infrastructure.