July 22, 2015
Congratulations to Princeton's networking group for their remarkable showing at SIGCOMM 2015, the ACM's annual showcase of the top technical results in applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communication. Not only do Princeton researchers have 5 papers in this year's traditional technical program, but two additional pieces of work will be honored at the symposium.
First, Jennifer Rexford, Professor and new Chair of the Princeton Computer Science Department, and her collaborators, won SIGCOMM's prestigious Test-of-Time Award. This award recognizes networking research from 10 years ago that has made a lasting impact on the field. In 2015, the award has been granted for "A clean slate 4D approach to network control and management," a paper by Albert Greenberg, Gisli Hjalmtysson, David A. Maltz, Andy Myers, Jennifer Rexford, Geoffrey Xie, Hong Yan, Jibin Zhan, and Hui Zhang that first appeared in CCR 2005. According to the Test-of-Time award committee, "This paper led to a resurgence of interest in the topic of separated data and control planes to better manage networks that developed into Software Defined Networking (SDN)." The 2015 Test-of-Time award was shared with a second highly influential paper, "Sizing router buffers" by Guido Appenzeller, Isaac Keslassy, and Nick McKeown from SIGCOMM 2004. Congratulations to all of the award winners!
Second, the paper "Programming Protocol-independent Packet Processors," published in the ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communications Review (CCR) in July 2014 and written by Professor Rexford, recently-graduated PhD student Cole Schlesinger, Professor David Walker, and their collaborators Pat Bosshart, Dan Daly, Glen Gibb, Martin Izzard, Nick McKeown, Dan Talayco, Amin Vahdat and George Varghese is being included in the ACM SIGCOMM "Best-of-CCR" session. This paper motivates the need for, and sketches the design of, P4, a new, low-level language for programming software-defined network switches. This work on P4 shares a spot in the Best of CCR session together with another paper entitled "A Primer on IPv4 Scarcity" by Philipp Richter (TU Berlin / ICSI), Mark Allman (ICSI), Randy Bush (Internet Initiative Japan), Vern Paxson (UC Berkeley / ICSI), published in CCR in April 2015.