The focus of the project is to enable added-value services to be provided thanks to Software-Defined Networking (SDN), on top of Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) and other network interconnection fabrics. The services would relate not only to the flexibility of the interconnection fabric, but most importantly to enable the content and data center ecosystem that is present at the interconnection fabric to collaborate. The ultimate goal is to create a service marketplace on top of the ecosystem composed of cloud/data centers, networked applications, and the interconnection fabric.
The objective of ENDEAVOUR is to address current limitations of the Internet interconnection model, as well as to open the opportunity for novel services, creating the possibility for new economic models around the created ecosystems
Context & Problem
The rise of the IXP
IXPs originate at the time the Internet transitioned from an academic/research network into today’s commercial infrastructure. Over the past 20 years, as the Internet grew by leaps and bounds by any imaginable metric, the original four NAPs were replaced by a steadily increasing number of modern IXPs. The critical role they have played in the Internet ecosystem has until recently gone largely unnoticed by the Internet community at large.
Cloud & data centers in the Internet
To cope with the increasing demand for content, content delivery infrastructures --including Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), data centers, and cloud providers-- deploy massively distributed server infrastructures. IXPs will become even more critical when tighter delay constraints are necessary and more support from the network is required by applications running in the Cloud.
Software-Defined Networking (SDN)
Our approach builds upon SDN to simplify network management and make networks more flexible and robust. So far, SDN has mostly been considered in intradomain settings. Bringing SDN to the interdomain settings would generate much more impact, both for network operators as well as for networked applications.
