Optical Topology Programming: Foundations, Measurements, and Applications

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Date

2024-08-07

Authors

Hall, Matthew

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Publisher

University of Oregon

Abstract

This thesis advances the state-of-the-art in network management by challenging the prevailing notion that the joint optimization of optical and packet layers is currently impractical. It does so through two key contributions: (1) establishing the theoretical and empirical foundations for programming the optical topology, henceforth referred to as optical topology programming; and (2) demonstrating the advantages of optical topology programming in enhancing network security (e.g., combating network reconnaissance, volumetric DDoS) and network management (e.g., scaling traffic engineering) applications. We evaluate the performance of optical topology programming for these applications with a custom-built discrete event simulator. We demonstrate the ability of optical topology programming to improve scalability in traffic engineering systems, completely removing all instances of throughput loss for a diverse set of link failure and flash crowd events. We show that it is also capable of subverting attempts at network reconnaissance by dynamically changing the set of active network links and finding hundreds of alternative topology configurations that maintain traffic performance in seconds. Finally, we show that optical topology programming can improve defense capabilities against large-scale link flood attacks, reducing the number of successful link flood attacks from 134 to 9 (94%). This dissertation includes previously published and unpublished coauthored material.

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Keywords

Networking, Optics, SDN

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