The Continuing Evolution of the Internet Control Plane

The notion of an Internet "control plane" has slowly evolved from its origins in specific routing protocols (e.g., the original ARPAnet routing algorithm) to a more general framework for providing forwarding in network routers and maintaining network state. Several distinct generations of the control plane can be identified, reflecting the different concerns (e.g., scalability, reliability, and openness), technology tradeoffs (e.g., forwarding versus processing speeds, memory), and envisioned use at the time. Along the way, fundamentally new concepts were pioneered and validated in practice, including a best-effort versus guaranteed service model; end-point control and soft state; traffic engineering capabilities; and an increasingly clear separation of routing from forwarding and policy from implementation. In this talk, we discuss this evolution and its driving factors, contrasting them with their counterparts in telephone and mobile cellular networks, and drawing lessons learned. We discuss the continuing evolution of the control plane through software-defined networking, and potential future control planes envisioned in Future Internet Architecture (FIA) projects, including MobilityFirst.

Jim Kurose received a B.A. in physics from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in computer science from Columbia University. He is a Distinguished University Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts, where he has also served in a number of campus administrative roles, including department chair and dean of the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. He has been a Visiting Scientist at IBM Research, INRIA, LINCS, Institut EURECOM, the University of Paris, and Technicolor Research Labs.

His research interests include network protocols and architecture, network measurement, multimedia communication, and modeling and performance evaluation. Dr. Kurose has served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Communications and was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. He has been active in the program committees for IEEE Infocom, ACM SIGCOMM, ACM SIGMETRICS and the ACM Internet Measurement conferences for a number of years, and has served as Technical Program Co-Chair for these conferences. He has received several conference best paper awards, the ACM Sigcomm Test of Time Award, and the IEEE Infocom Award. He is also the recipient of number of teaching awards, including the IEEE Taylor Booth Education Medal.

He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association and the advisory council of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate at the National Science Foundation. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the ACM.

With Keith Ross, he is the co-author of the textbook Computer Networking, a Top-Down Approach (6th edition), published by Pearson.