A while ago I started discussing the intricate technical details of fibbing (an ingenious way of implementing traffic engineering with traditional OSPF) with Laurent Vanbever and other members of his group, and we decided to record a podcast on this topic.

Things never go as planned in a live chat, and we finished talking about another one of his projects – software defined Internet exchange point (SDX), the topic of Episode 41 of Software Gone Wild.

Correction: While NoviFlow is “that Canadian startup” we mentioned during our conversation, and they do use EZChip NPU to implement ridiculously-large flow tables, their hardware is not used by the SDX Laurent mentioned.

If you’d like to know more about Laurent’s work, visit his web site, and the IP Networking Lab @ University of Louvain. You might also want to read the papers we discussed during the podcast:

• SDX (Software-Defined Internet Exchange): article, NANOG presentation, source code
• Improving network agility with seamless BGP reconfigurations
• The impact of graceful IGP operations on BGP
• Seamless network-wide IGP migrations

Listen to the podcast