How the U.S. National Science Foundation Enabled Software-Defined Networking
8 comments
·October 29, 2025SurceBeats
The 10-year research-to-production timeline is the key lesson. Today's funding (VC or government grants) demands results in 2-3 years. We've systematically eliminated the "patient capital" that creates foundational infrastructure imho...
chuckadams
To say nothing of systematically eliminating the foundational infrastructure for nationally funded science in general.
Animats
> a network should have logically centralized control, where the control software has network-wide visibility and direct control across the distributed collection of network devices.
Including a backdoor for wiretapping in SDN-enabled routers.
acdha
Is it really a “back door” when it’s controlled by the network owner? It feels like we need a different term for that since it’s increasingly common on large networks.
blackmanta
Unless the goal of the backdoor is to redirect traffic flows through packet inspection devices that the attacker also controls, the decoupling of the control and data plane in SDN deployments requires a more creative, intricate solution to allow for wiretapping compared to traditional routers.
zdw
I worked with a quite few of the folks mentioned in this article when I was at the Open Networking Foundation, if anyone has questions.
heathermiller
what a wonderful chronicle of how esoteric research became not-esoteric, and truly world-changing, and how the NSF enabled it
pour one out for the NSF folks. RIP </3
> 2003: The goal of the 100×100 project was to create communication architectures that could provide 100Mb/s networking for all 100 million American homes.
Well you failed horribly.
> The project brought together researchers from Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, Berkeley, and AT&T.
I think I see why.
> This research led to the 4D architecture for logically centralized network control of a distributed data plane
What? How was this meant to benefit citizens?
> Datacenter owners grew frustrated with the cost and complexity of the commercially available networking equipment; a typical datacenter switch cost more than $20,000 and a hyperscaler needed about 10,000 switches per site. They decided they could build their own switch box for about $2,000 using off-the-shelf switching chips from companies such as Broadcom and Marvell
What role did the NSF play here? It sounds like basic economics did most of the actual work.
> The start-up company Nicira, which emerged from the NSF-funded Ethane project, developed the Network Virtualization Platform (NVP)26 to meet this need
Which seems to have _zero_ mentions outside of academic papers.