Three graduate students, Tanuj Chawla, Eduard Renart and Riham Elsaadany, participated in a SDN Throwdown event organized by Juniper networks, and won second place.
The SDN Throwdown is a yearly hackathon organized by Juniper Networks and Comcast where they bring together around 10 teams from top-schools to compete against each other. A real-world problem is given that needs to be addressed alongside the lines of being creative and innovative with technologies and ideas. For the 8-day program, a total of 10 teams across 8 universities participated ? 6 universities in the U.S. (Columbia-2, Rutgers, Princeton, UPenn-2, NYU, NYIT) and 2 universities from the Netherlands (Radboud and TU Eindhoven).
The event commenced on Monday, February 22nd at Juniper Network?s OpenLab in Bridgewater. The team from Rutgers DCS participated in the workshop/training sessions for the first two days of the program (February 22nd and 23rd), then worked off-premise (at DataMan Lab ? DCS Rutgers) developing the team?s application solution. On Monday, February 29th, they delivered their solution pitches (presentation and demonstration) and secured second position in the challenge. The event was judged by leaders from Juniper and Comcast and a third party judge from NJTech MeetUp.
For the problem statement, the team was given a volatile network and were asked to build an autonomous network management system which should be as resilient as possible. The team came up with this idea of ?make before break? (switching paths before they fail by predicting failures with a prediction model) and ?multiple simultaneous traffic types? (by building a mathematical model with a simple knob tweaking interface to adapt to the nature of traffic – latency sensitive, high throughput or no packet loss).
Here is an official link which talks more about the event: http://forums.juniper.net/t5/The-New-Network/SDN-Throwdown-Juniper-and-Comcast-to-Host-University-Competition/ba-p/288287