The Genesis Kernel: a programming system for spawning network architectures

M.E. Kounavis, A.T. Campbell, S. Chou, F. Modoux, J. Vicente, Hao Zhuang
2001 IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications  
Currently, the design, deployment and refinement of new network architectures is a manual, ad-hoc and time-consuming process. We present the design, implementation and evaluation of the Genesis Kernel, a programming system that automates the life cycle process for the creation, deployment, management, and architecting of network architectures. We discuss our experiences in building a spawning network that is capable of creating distinct virtual network architectures on-demand. The Genesis
more » ... is based on a methodology that allows a child virtual network to operate on top of a subset of its parent's network resources and in isolation from other spawned virtual networks. We show through experimentation how a number of diverse network architectures can be spawned and architecturally refined. These spawned network architectures include a parent network that supports IP forwarding, and interior and exterior routing. We discuss how two child networks based on Cellular IP and Mobiware architectures can be spawned on the parent network to support wireless access to data and continuous media services, respectively. networks share resources, they do not necessarily use the same software for controlling those resources. In this paper, we describe the design, implementation and evaluation of the Genesis Kernel, a programming system that automates the creation, deployment, management and refinement of network architectures. The Genesis Kernel is an enabling technology for spawning networks that automates the virtual network life cycle process, which comprises profiling, spawning, management and architecting. The profiling phase captures the blueprint of a network architecture in terms of a comprehensive profiling script. The spawning phase systematically sets up the topology and address space, allocates resources and binds transport, control and management objects to the physical network infrastructure. The management phase supports virtual network resource management [4] while the architecting phase allows network designers to add, remove or replace distributed network algorithms on-demand analyzing the pros and cons of the network design space. In order to evaluate our approach we have built a spawning networks testbed and designed a set of experiments to help verify the Genesis Kernel's capability to dynamically create, manage and architect network architectures. We have spawned a parent network architecture that supports IP forwarding, and interior and exterior routing. The spawning networks testbed comprises a number of heterogeneous link layers including Ethernet, wireless LAN and ATM technologies. Two distinct child networks have been spawned over the parent network based on the Cellular IP [2] and Mobiware [3] architectures offering wireless data and multimedia services to mobile users, respectively. Both of these architectures were previously developed by the COMET Group, and have been fully implemented and evaluated in standalone testbeds; see [13] and [14] for details. We refer to the spawned IP, Cellular IP and Mobiware architectures as the baseline architectures. We also show how the Mobiware and Cellular IP child networks can be architecturally refined.
doi:10.1109/49.917711 fatcat:bfvyfwtzabea3cnowx6cddtkbe