Cloud Computing

Cornell Taps Private Partner To Test Traffic Routing Tools

• By Joshua Bolkan
• 05/10/16

Cornell University's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering has teamed with a private partner to test and implement new technology for dynamic, optimal routing.

As a result of the partnership, Global Cloud Xchange (GCX) is providing a test network that "is configured and monitored from a cloud platform that connects to locally distributed software agents that control the forwarding plane," according to a news release. "Ongoing testing demonstrates some of the latest developments in SDN, including disaggregated networking with OpenFlow."

"As part of our commitment to support research and higher education, we are pleased to provide Cornell with a live production environment for deploying and testing the new traffic control solutions," said Wilfred Kwan, chief operating officer, Reliance Communications (Enterprise) and Global Cloud Xchange, in a prepared statement. "The environment includes the GCX Cloud X nodes and Layer 2 / Layer 3 networks across multiple locations in North America, Europe, and Asia. The virtual machines at each of the cloud nodes are fully interconnected via the GCX network."

Currently deployed on the company's Cloud X platform in Palo Alto, New York, Hong Kong and London, the partners are gathering network analytics in real time to track dynamic load balancing for optimal traffic distribution.

"Our demonstrations show that real time applications, such as streaming video, can run smoothly over the network even when a network outage occurs. In the event of such a failure, the new management solution re-converges network routes in about 100 milliseconds. The recovery time is so swift that video streaming remains unaffected," said Cornell Professor Kevin Tang, head of the university's research group overseeing the project, in a prepared statement.