Software Networking

IBM Research has one of the oldest active industrial research departments in the area of communications and networking, with its roots tracing back to the SNA architecture. From those days, we have evolved into a dynamic organization setting the trend for many leading areas in current network technologies. IBM Research is currently focused primarily on server-centric networking, network management issues, high-speed network processors, and network-centric service offerings. We maintain a high degree of involvement with the academic community, with strong participation in many leading conferences technical and executive committees. With about a hundred researchers focusing on issues related to communications and networking worldwide, IBM Research remains a key center for leading edge networking technologies.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the lower layers of the communications stack have tended to standardize along the TCP/IP protocol suite. The recent years have witnessed a tremendous growth in the size and capacity of computer networks, in the public Internet as well as in most corporate and enterprise intranets. The complexity associated with managing them have increased tremendously, and is one of the leading challenges facing the Research Community. Can we develop technologies and schemes that can lead to simplified network management? The policy based networking technologies developed at Research provide an approach that can help simplify the task of managing computer networks.

Despite a tremendous increase in the capacity of the core network, the performance of the public Internet remains spotty at best. Many approaches have been used to address the performance issues of the Internet, with a lot of present research focusing on the notion of content distribution networks. The content distribution paradigm uses a system of multiple proxies distributed throughout the network to provide a scalable low-latency infrastructure that can bypass the wide-area congestion points and hot-spots. IBM Research has several activities related to content distribution of static content, multimedia streams as well as general-purpose applications.

The Communications and Networking Research area works in close partnership with many IBM product divisions, helping to bridge the gap between academic research and the needs of real products. Our key partners within the IBM Corporation include the Server Division, Software Division, Tivoli, and IBM Global Services.