Computer Science Seminar - University of Houston
Skip to main content

Computer Science Seminar

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) Applications and Experiments for Network Science and Engineering

Seminar Slides: Download (PDF)

When: Friday, February 21, 2014
Where: PGH 232
Time: 11:00 AM

Speaker: Prof. Deniz Gurkan, Computer Engineering Technology, University of Houston

Host: Prof. Lennart Johnsson

Software-defined networking is causing a big paradigm shift in network science and engineering while opening a big era of innovation opportunity. Although partial approaches to realization of SDN have been present for the last 20+ years, current industry interest and participation has resulted in creative commercial solutions. These solutions and the centralized SDN control plane merit research investigations on SDN applications. The talk is on research results on some particular SDN applications: (i) on-demand programming of the network for high speed video transmissions; (ii) enabling hardware-accelerated manipulation of flows at network middleboxes; (iii) automated firewall bypass and rule offloading to network forwarding plane; and (iv) programmable use of forwarding elements as a software construct. Also, there will be a presentation of research planned as part of the new CC-NIE grant from NSF in creation of a network debugging tool using the SDN paradigm. Future research directions include the taxonomy and framework on hybrid switch/processing unit boxes and programmable header processing.

Bio:
Deniz Gurkan received her PhD in optical fiber networking from the University of Southern California, Electrical Engineering, in 2003. Her BS and MS are also in Electrical Engineering, and both are from Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. After teaching at the Claremont Graduate University, Applied Math, and California State University, Long Beach, EE, she joined the faculty of Computer Engineering Technology at the University of Houston in 2004. Her research involves interoperable data exchange protocols, instrumentation and measurement, optical networking, sensor networks, information technology enterprise integration, and infrastructure development. She has been actively involved in infrastructure development of the NSF project called GENI (Global Environment for Network Innovation), and now, she is an experimenter utilizing GENI as a research and development lab for her industry collaborations. Prof. Gurkan is the associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement, serves in the technical program committee and the steering committee of the IEEE Sensors Applications Symposium since 2010. She is the graduate program director for the Network Communications MS program in the College of Technology. She represents University of Houston in the Technical Advisory Group of the regional research and education network of Texas, LEARN (among 30+ other Texas institutions). She has been co-chairing the SDN (Software Defined Networking) workgroup of the Internet2 since 2010.