High-performance data center networks are required to support both commercial and scientific applications. In the commercial domain, off-the-shelf Ethernet switches are commonly used within data centers to interconnect large numbers (e.g., 100,000 to 1 million) of servers. Standards based solutions such as IETF TRansparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL) and the IEEE 802.1aq Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) solutions will be reviewed. 

General interconnection topologies such as trees, fat trees, hypercubes, torus, flattened butterfly, and Clos network, research proposals for Ethernet/IP based architectures such SEATTLE, PortLand, VL2, Hedera, and SPAIN, and server-based architectures, such as DCell, BCube, FiConn, and MDCube, will be covered. Optical interconnects such as c-Through, Helios and OSA, wireless interconnects, and energy efficient architectures, will also be reviewed. While scalability is a key consideration for commercial applications, latency is a key consideration for scientific applications. Currently, data centers that support scientific applications use InfiniBand for inter-process communications (due to its low latency).

New technologies, such as Internet Wide-Area RDMA Protocol (iWARP) and Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), are being tested to allow for the execution of low-latency MPI applications on clusters with high-speed Ethernet interconnects. These technologies, along with FibreChannel, which is used for storage, will be reviewed in this tutorial.

This tutorial will present the state-of-the-art in the field of "Optical networks" and emphasize the relevance of optical networks to Future Internet architectures. Optical networks encompass traditional networks operating on optical fiber as well as wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) networks. The topics which will be covered in this tutorial include optical network architectures, design, modeling and operation, optical network survivability and optical network simulation tools.

The tutorial will also cover the role of optical networking in architectures for the Future Internet proposed recently such as the MobilityFirst architecture.

The explosive growth of mobile broadband traffic, spectrum availability challenges, architectural evolutions driven by introduction of LTE and LTE-Advanced, heterogeneous network design, cloud oriented split radio access  network architectures and requirements for packet based timing and synchronization, requires re-thinking strategies for mobile backhaul.

This tutorial will put the pieces together and discuss next generation mobile backhaul including: topologies & capacity requirements while factoring introduction of LTE and LTE-Advanced, impact of small cells, support for CPRI, migration to IPv6, 1588v2 based timing and synchronization methods and review impacts on current macro cell Ethernet backhaul architectures deployed by operators. The tutorial will also discuss business opportunities for operators both for retailing and wholesale purposes, opportunities for OEMs as well as other ecosystem providers such as silicon & software vendors and system integrators.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging architecture for computer networking that comprises of a programmable control plane that is physically separated from the data plane in a network switch runs on a standard server and communicates with the switches through a standard protocol such as OpenFlow. This separation allows users and administrators to program routing policies and rules using high level languages such as Java and Python, without knowing anything about the arcane CLI commands supported by network switches. SDN can bring enormous value to a data center network. In this tutorial, we will first give an overview of SDN and then describe SDN use cases.
Outline:

a. Overview of SDN and OpenFlow

b. SDN use cases  - firewalls, support for identical addresses in a single network, service replication through SDN, etc.

c. Demos/practice sessions for some of the above use cases using FloodLight (open source OpenFlow controller) and  Mininet (open source emulation environment).