Achieving flexibility and performance for packet forwarding and data center management

Although today's networking equipment has achieved high performance and low cost by embedding forwarding logic in hardware, this has come at the price of severely reduced flexibility. In this dissertation, we address the problem of achieving both flexibility and performance in two networking domains: packet forwarding and data center networking. In packet forwarding, we present Software Defined Forwarding, a hybrid design that attempts to combine the high speed and low cost of hardware with the superior flexibility of software. Within the data center context, we propose Ripcord, a platform for data center routing and management. Through simulation, prototype implementation and testbed experiments, we demonstrate that these solutions achieve both flexibility and high performance in their respective contexts.