“Instead of buying a fixed function box from company x, you can define your own functionality,” Foster said. Foster’s aim is the software piece, the part that enables customization.

Rather than relying on traditional networking hardware, SDNs are driven by software and dedicated controllers capable of managing entire networks. For network administrators, programming networks is cumbersome and prone to human error, costing time and money, Foster said.Įnter software-defined networking (SDN), a relatively new, open-sourced approach to network connectivity that Foster and his colleagues are helping to develop.

While customization has surged in the era of open source, the devices and consoles that keep us connected have remained proprietary and rigid, defined by the manufacturers that designed them. Now, we have rich services – on our phones, and in our homes – and networks are an important piece of that.”Īn important piece whose progress is lagging against the pace of rapid innovations in other areas of computing, Foster said. “We bought discs and installed them on our computers. “For a long time, we had PCs in our homes, but they didn’t connect to anything,” Foster said. They have designed a fundamental platform to support a new way of managing networks. Nate Foster, an assistant professor in Cornell’s Department of Computer Science, leads a team of developers and researchers from Cornell, Princeton University, the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium. From richly designed operating systems to interactive mobile apps, computing has never been more user-focused and user-friendly.īut behind the curtain of everyday computing – where local and global networks connect our devices and enable the sharing of information – computer scientists at Cornell are working to improve the infrastructure of our increasingly interconnected, online lives.

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