Krishnamurthy, ArvindSharma, Naveen Kumar2020-02-042020-02-042020-02-042019Sharma_washington_0250E_21091.pdfhttp://hdl.handle.net/1773/45160Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2019Historically, computer networks have been designed to have most of the complexity at the end-hosts, while the switches connecting them are simple forwarding pipes that understand a fixed, well-specified set of protocols. This simplifies switching chip design, enabling them to operate at high speeds, albeit at the cost of little to no flexibility. On the other hand, recent advances in hardware switch architectures have made it feasible to perform limited flexible packet processing without sacrificing performance. Network operators can configure switches to process custom packet headers to exercise greater control over how packets are processed and routed. However, these switches have limited state, limited per-packet computation, restricted class of operations, and support a fixed set of scheduling primitives to be able to operate at line rate. This thesis explores various mechanisms and techniques to overcome these switch limitations and implement efficient network protocols that rely on both flexible computation and packet scheduling inside the network. First, we use approximation techniques to mask limitations on computation and network state, letting us implement rich protocols that perform complex computations inside the network. Next, we propose an approximate scheduling mechanism based on Calendar Queues that lets us implement a wide range of scheduling algorithms to achieve various end-to-end performance objectives. Finally, we implement some of these protocols on real hardware and within a packet-level simulator to demonstrate significant performance improvement over state-of-the-art techniques.application/pdfen-USnoneComputer NetworksFair QueueingNetwork ProtocolsNetwork SwitchesPacket SchedulingProgrammable RoutersComputer scienceComputer engineeringInformation technologyComputer science and engineeringThesis