Keynote Speaker

Dimitrios Pezaros

University of Bristol, UK 

Biography: Deploying advanced services such as cybersecurity and stateful resource provisioning over constrained and legacy environments connecting at the periphery of the Internet can be costly and challenging. Traditional middlebox but also legacy Software-Defined Networking (SDN) approaches like OpenFlow have significant limitations in terms of protocol support and line-rate packet processing capabilities. At the same time, while stateless network programmatically through languages such as P4 has gained traction for high-density high-throughput environments like the datacentre, in-network support for deployment of stateful services at the Edge requiring low latency and without relying on specific target architectures has remained, until recently, relatively unexplored.

In this talk, I will draw examples from different advanced service use-cases such as asset discovery and monitoring, in-network encryption, and stateful load balancing to demonstrate a software-defined networking architecture based on centralized orchestration, and using eBPF-based programmable data planes with support for complex functions and stateful processing. This combination enables dynamic installation and chaining of arbitrary number of network functions for line-rate packet processing into programmable nodes, and central network-wide orchestration with an interactive dashboard.

Title:  Network Programmability and Softwarisation for advanced services deployment at the Edge 

Abstract:  Dimitrios Pezaros is (full) Professor of Computer Networks, and Director of the networked systems (netlab) and Cyberdefence research laboratories in the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow, where he holds the Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair in Digital Resilience for Critical National Infrastructure. He has received significant funding for his research from various funding agencies and industry, and has published widely in the areas of computer communications, network and service management, cybersecurity and network resilience. He is a Chartered Engineer, a fellow of BCS and IET, and Senior Member of IEEE and ACM.