Crossbow Sigcomm09 papers are now online

Guest Author

Crossbow Sigcomm09 papers are now online

Here are the details of the two Crossbow ACM Sigcomm09 papers

Crossbow: From Hardware Virtualized NICs to Virtualized Networks
Abstract: This paper describes a new architecture for achieving network virtualization using virtual NICs (VNICs) as the building blocks.
The VNICs can be associated with dedicated and independent hardware lanes that consist of dedicated NIC and kernel resources.
Hardware lanes support dynamic polling, which enables the fair sharing of bandwidth with no performance penalty. VNICs ensure full separation of traffic for virtual machines within the host. A collection of VNICs on one or more physical machines can be connected
to create a Virtual Wire by assigning them a common attribute such as a VLAN tag. The full paper is available here
Crossbow: A vertically integrated QoS stack
Abstract: This paper describes a new architecture which addresses Quality of Service (QoS) by creating unique flows for applications, services, or subnets.
A flow is a dedicated and independent path from the NIC hardware to the socket layer in which the QoS layer is integrated into the protocol
stack instead of being implemented as a separate layer. Each flow has dedicated hardware and software resources allowing applications to meet their specified quality of service within the host.

The architecture efficiently copes with Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks by creating zero or limited bandwidth flows for
the attacking traffic. The unwanted packets can be dropped by the NIC hardware itself at no cost.

A collection of flows on more than one host can be assigned the same Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP) label which forms a path dedicated to a service across the enterprise network and enables end-to-end QoS within the data center. The full paper is available here