The team led by Professor Yoo Chuck developed and demonstrated a world class original technology for network virtualization

Details of the research are scheduled to be announced at the world-renowned academic conference, INFOCOM 2020

The technology is expected to dramatically improve performance and reduce costs of streaming services such as Netflix and user services that drive artificial intelligence computation

▲ From left: Professor Yoo Chuck (research director), Research Professor Yang Gyeong-sik (first author), 

Yu Bong-yeol (graduate student), Jin Hee-sang (graduate student), Kang Min-koo (master’s program), 

Yoo Yeon-ho (master's program)

Recently, major computer services including OTT streaming (Netflix, for example), artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT), and blockchains are operated on public clouds such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The cloud is based on 'virtualization' technology. Virtualization refers to the technology of creating another 'virtual' computer that operates within a limited physical computer. More specifically, it is a technology that provides users with CPU, memory, switches, routers, etc., which are physical resources of a computer.

Through virtualization, limited physical resources are used by multiple users(tenants) with each user using these resources as though they were fully allocated to them. In addition, virtualization is divided into server virtualization and network virtualization. Network virtualization is a technique that enables the computer communication of each user based on a limited singular network (switch, router, link, port, etc.).

In other words, network virtualization technology must operate effectively so that cloud-based computing services can be realized properly. Until now, this technology had been developed by leading American companies such as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon.

The team led by Professor Yoo Chuck (Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the College of Informatics) has developed a new, “programmable” network virtualization original technology in this field.

Existing network virtualization technology has a limitation in that the user cannot directly configure and control the number of devices and the operation of the devices for virtual switches, virtual links, and ports. This limitation has been a barrier to improving the quality of service in the cloud because the service provider cannot perform virtual network configuration, performance monitoring, or bottleneck removal to optimize the service. To overcome this, the technology allows users to directly create network resources and directly control the inside of the network. It is a world class technology that extends the resources that can be controlled from the cloud to the network.

Prof. Yoo and the research team have been carrying out research since 2015 to develop these programmable network virtualization original technologies.

To address the problems of conducting online lectures in an ‘untact’ setting, a demonstration applying the research results of Professor Yoo’s team was showcased at the Woojung Hall of Informatics on Tuesday, June 23,

▲ Technical demonstration held at the Woojung Hall of Informatics.

Through the developed technology, network programming to perform bottleneck analysis and optimization became possible and it is expected to bring significant performance improvement and cost reduction of streaming services such as Netflix and user services that drive artificial intelligence computation.

In particular, the research results are to be released in the form of open source software, which is expected to contribute to promoting research worldwide and to propel the technological advancement of the domestic cloud market. (https://openvirtex.com)

The team will give a presentation on the topic of "Network Monitoring for SDN Virtual Networks" at the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM 2020), a world-renowned academic conference (#1 ranked academic conference in the field of computer networks according to the Google Scholar H-5 Index), in the field of computer networks that will be held online in July.

* Authors: Professor Yang Kyung-sik (1st author), Jin Hee-sang (graduate student), Kang Min-gu (graduate student), Moon Ki-jun (master’s program), Professor Yoo Chuck (corresponding author, research director)

In addition, the research results of the team were published in the April edition of the IEEE Communications Magazine, a world-renowned journal in the field of computer networks (top 2.44% of SCI journals).

* Title of paper : "Libera for Programmable Network Virtualization",

* Authors : Research Professor Yang Kyung-Sik (1st author), Yoo Bong-Yeol (graduate student), Jin Hee-Sang (graduate student), Professor Yoo Chuck (corresponding author, research director)

The results of this study were made possible through the support from the Broadcasting and Communication Technology Development Project and the SW Star Lab Project of the Ministry of Science and ICT's Institute for Information & Communication.

Professor Yoo said, "It is meaningful that we have developed a global standard for software-defined networking solutions and established a partnership with the Open Networking Foundation, who develop open source software, to research network virtualization platforms.