Hyojoon "Joon" Kim and Ankur Nayak presented a next-generation access control system called Resonance at the GENI Engineering Conference at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.   The current Georgia Tech network access control framework is based on complicated network configuration settings, making it difficult for operators to debug the system, to make changes to it, and to implement complicated network policies.

Joon and Ankur have been developing a next-generation version of Georgia Tech's access control framework, based on OpenFlow.  The OpenFlow architecture decouples a network's control framework from individual network devices.  We are using this framework to allow operators to express more complex policies in a higher-level language.  The Resonance access control system is deployed on the Georgia Tech campus in research labs across three buildings.  We are in the process of evaluating this deployment for real users on the network.  A more widespread campus deployment is planned over the course of the coming year.

The video below shows the Resonance system in action.  You can also read a bit more about Resonance:

• In our ACM SIGCOMM workshop paper from last year, which describes the basic design.
• In our IEEE LANMAN invited paper, which describes some of the high-level design philosophy behind Resonance.

Yogesh Mundada gave a talk at the Click Symposium in Belgium last week on his new OpenFlow Click Element, which he developed with Rob Sherwood at Deutche Telekom Labs.

The OpenFlow Click element is a module for the Click modular router that can be controlled via a standard OpenFlow controller.  The element essentially turns a Click router into a software switch with flow table entries.  One of the most powerful aspects of this paradigm is that it allows hybrid packet and flow processing, as part of a paradigm we call Flowlets.

More details about OpenFlow Click element are available here:

• Element Documentation
• Slides