Our goal for the EARL project is to pioneer SDN enabled measurement-based network management to enhance the Internet infrastructure. This will lead to relevant tools and data for the larger researcher and practitioner communities. To this aim, we will create a new research instrument, EARLnet: an operational, research-centered, Autonomous System (AS) directly connected to our partners, providing a new and unique real-world environment for the real-time monitoring of network status and SDN-oriented research. EARLnet will serve also as a test-bed to develop and evaluate novel reactive network management solutions.

• To devise a Software Defined Monitoring (SDM) architecture that enables measurement innovation using SDN. We will architect a scalable hardware and software monitoring platform capable of tracking specific Internet-wide interactions in near real-time. It will be able to operate at multiple levels of granularity (e.g., looking at the aggregate traffic interactions or pinpointing specific services).
• To overcome the limitations of current BGP-TE practices in network management by exploiting SDN. SDN offers the ability to explicitly observe the data from the forwarding and the control plane, thus providing a higher level of granularity than legacy solutions.
• To investigate reactive traffic engineering (TE) capabilities based on the SDM architecture. In contrast to the current static TE, in reactive TE, the resources are re-assigned at runtime to meet changing application requirements and/or resource availability.
• To upgrade legacy BGP-TE practices. Alongside new network management policies to be developed using the SDM platform, we will actively transition existing TE techniques.
• To encourage further research and innovation based on the data retrieved from EARLnet. The symbiotic relationship between EARL and Cambridge Cybercrime Centre will also make the data accessible to a wider community.

• earl at qmul.ac.uk
• United Kingdom