Network systems interconnection

BACKGROUND
Systems in communication networks are getting increasingly large and complicated, and have reached a level of complexity that makes them difficult and expensive to design, manufacture and operate. One approach to reduce the flexibility of switches, routers, servers, etc. is to design them as a distributed system that consist of loosely interconnected elements, which cooperate to perform the network system
functions.
One of the most important components in such a system is the protocol that is used for internal communication between the elements. Within the Internet Engineering Task Force, one such protocol is currently being standardized, namely the ForCES protocol (ForCES stands for
Forwarding and Control Element Separation).
There are few, if any, existing implementations of ForCES in the public domain. The purpose of this Master’s project is to design and evaluate an implementation of the ForCES protocol in a network laboratory environment. The protocol will be realized in the Distributed Router testbed available at KTH, which is an environment for experimental research on novel network system architectures. The Master’s thesis project is a conducted at the Telecommunication Systems Laboratory at the KTH School of Information and Communication technology.

GOAL
The goal of this thesis project is to develop and analyze a working implementation of ForCES. It will be done in UNIX (Linux) and the implementation language is C/C++. The implementation should be based
on the latest IETF Internet draft. In the KTH Distributed Router testbed, a prototypical implementation is available of a protocol with similar functionality to ForCES. This protocol provides the basic functionality, but is a non-standard protocol which has been used mainly for experiments with distributed router architectures. The purpose of this project is to replace this prototypical implementation with an implementation that conforms to the FoRCES standard.

PROJECT OUTLINE
The main steps in the project are as follows:
* Study of ForCES standard and identification of the key parts of the
protocol
* Definition of implementation approach within Distributed Router
tested
* Definition of evaluation metrics and relevant experiments and
measurements
* Design and implementation
* Performing measurements, and analysis of results

WORK PLAN
The first steps in the thesis project should be the following:
* A literature study to cover what has been done previously in the
area, and to learn about and understand the problem
* A time plan, with milestones and deliverables. One of the first
milestones should be the identification of relevant performance
metrics.
* An outline of the thesis report, with sections, subsections and
keywords.
* Definition of implementation approach, and implementation work plan
* Design and implementation
* Experimental analysis and verification

COMPETENCE REQUIRED
* Knowledge in TCP/IP networking
* Experience with Linux OS and programming skills in C and Java

READING MATERIAL
[1] ForCES--Forwarding and Control Element Separation,
URL=http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/forces-charter.html

PRACTICAL ARRANGEMENTS
* The duration of the project is four months
* The project is for two persons
* The physical location is at KTH in Kista.
* Scientific supervision and advisory responsibilities are provided by
KTH
* Technical guidance, hardware platform and software development tools
are provided by KTH.