The Art of Consistent SDN Updates

Computer networks, e.g., enterprise, carrier, or datacenter networks, have become a critical infrastructure of our digital society. However, realizing dependable networks is challenging, as we do not only need to guarantee a range of static invariants, e.g., related to correctness, availability, and performance, but also support flexible reconfigurations and updates. Accordingly, and fueled by the advent of Software-Defined Networks (SDNs), consistent network update problems have recently received much attention, both from the networking and the algorithms community.

Stefan Schmid studied Computer Science at ETH Zurich (minor: micro/macro economics, internship: CERN) and did his PhD in the Distributed Computing Group led by Prof. Roger Wattenhofer, also at ETH Zurich. As a postdoc, he worked with Prof. Christian Scheideler at the Chair for Efficient Algorithms at the Technical University of Munich and at the Chair for Theory of Distributed Systems at the University of Paderborn. From 2009 to 2015, Stefan was a senior research scientist at the Telekom Innovation Laboratories (T-Labs) and at TU Berlin (Internet Network Architectures group headed by Prof. Anja Feldmann). Since the end of 2015, he is a (tenured) Associate Professor in the Distributed and Embedded Systems group at Aalborg University, Denmark, and continues working part-time for TU Berlin. Stefan currently also serves as the Editor of the Distributed Computing Column of the Bulletin of the European Association of Theoretical Computer Science (BEATCS) and as Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management (TNSM). In terms of research, Stefan is interested in fundamental aspects and problems of distributed and networked systems, currently with a focus on software-defined networking and network virtualization.