It’s Friday! Time for another Google Summer of Code wrap-up post. Boston University / XIA is one of the 37 new organizations to the program this year. Read below about three student projects and their work to discover the future architecture of the internet.
Linux XIA is the native implementation of eXpressive Internet Architecture (XIA), a meta network architecture that supports evolution of all of its components, which we call “principals,” and promotes interoperability between these principals. We are developing Linux XIA because we believe that the most effective way to find the future Internet architecture that will eventually replace TCP/IP is to crowdsource the search. This crowdsourced search is possible in Linux XIA.
Our organization, Boston University / XIA, received 34 proposals from 12 countries. As a first-year organization in Google Summer of Code (GSoC), we were surprised by the number of proposals, and we did our best to choose great students for each of the following projects:
XLXC is a set of scripts written in Ruby that creates network topologies using virtual interfaces and Linux containers. While testing a new network stack, a good amount of work goes into creating testing environments. XLXC saves developers and tinkerers a lot of time while experimenting with Linux XIA. Our student Aryaman Gupta from India worked with mentor Rahul Kumar to enable XLXC to emulate any topology using a language to describe the topologies.
Linux XIA needs to call forwarding functions that correspond to each XID type in order to forward a packet. XID types are 32-bit identifiers associated with principals which, in turn, define the forwarding functions. Being able to hash each XID type to a unique entry in an array increases the number of packets Linux XIA can forward per second because it reduces the number of memory accesses per lookup. Our student Pranav Goswami, also from India, worked with mentor Qiaobin Fu to find the best perfect hashing algorithm for Linux XIA to use in this case, and implemented it in Linux XIA.
We do not know how the future Internet will route packets between autonomous systems (ASes), but we are certain that Linux XIA can leverage IP's routing tables to have large deployments of Linux XIA. This is the goal of the LPM principal: leveraging routing tables derived from BGP, OSPF, IS-IS and any other IP routing protocol to forward XIA packets natively, that is, without encapsulation in IP. Thanks to the evolution mechanism built into Linux XIA, when a better way to route between ASes becomes available, we will be able to incrementally phase LPM out. Student André Ferreira Eleuterio from Brazil implemented the LPM principal in Linux XIA with the help of mentor Cody Doucette.
We are going to work with our students during the fall to have their contributions merged into our repositories and to add new projects to our ideas list that build upon their contributions. We expect that this will motivate new contributors by showing how much impact they can have on Linux XIA. Finally, new collaborators do not need to wait for the next GSoC to get involved! Join our community today, and "do what you can, with what you have, where you are" to make a difference like our three students successfully did.
By Michel Machado, Organization Administrator for Boston University / XIA
