Networking and Security Researcher Sylvia Ratnasamy Receives Okawa Research Grant

^{January 9, 2014}
Networking and Security researcher and UC Berkeley Professor Sylvia Ratnasamy has received a 2013 Okawa Foundation Research Grant. The grant is awarded annually by the Okawa Foundation for Information and Telecommunications and funds research in the field of information technology by faculty in the U.S., China, Japan, and Korea. Ratnasamy's award is for her research in building networks with rich traffic processing features implemented in software. The title and abstract for her project are below. Past winners of the Okawa Research Grant include alum Krste Asanovic in 2007 and affiliate Dan Klein in 2009, both UC Berkeley professors.

The Okawa Foundation was established in 1986 to promote development of information and communications technology and to encourage international collaboration.

Building Software-Centric Networks

The Internet was originally designed to support a single task: the transport of data "packets" from a source to a destination. Consequently, networks have traditionally been built using special-purpose hardware tailored to this (single and simple) task. The problem, however, is that modern networks must increasingly go beyond simply transporting data to inspect, store and even transform the data they carry. Infrastructure based on narrowly-specialized solutions makes it difficult – if not outright impossible – to meet these diverse and evolving needs. My research is driven by an alternate vision for how we build networks. Drawing from the success of the general-purpose computer ecosystem, I propose building networks using commodity general-purpose hardware with rich traffic processing features implemented in software, thus creating the foundation for a software-centric Internet infrastructure that is capable of rapid and cost-effective innovation.