Attracted by the chance to compete to create cool things with new technologies, more than 900 students from colleges across the country gathered last weekend at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for HackIllinois. With breathtaking innovation, student teams cooked up a bounty of solutions, ranging from mobile apps to websites to Wi-Fi connected devices.
Many of the students were drawn to projects related to software-defined networking (SDN), with its new approach to designing, building, and managing networks. SDN’s ability to separate the network’s control and forwarding planes to better optimize each, and to enable programmable networks, spurred several remarkable projects.
The 36-hour hackathon inspired students to build 180 technical projects. Conducted on the university’s main campus at the Thomas M. Siebel Center for Computer Science and the Electrical & Computing Engineering Building, the second annual HackIllinois also featured 55 sponsors, including the likes of Meru Networks, Google, Apple, Facebook, and IBM.
As one of the sponsors, Meru kicked off the event at the opening night by encouraging students to build SDN Applications. Meru’s 802.11 ac Wi-Fi networks, which connected the event and its 900+ attendees, worked flawlessly.
I attended the hackathon and felt that the interest from students was something special. Many students stopped by the Meru booth to discover the basics of SDN, and some offered advanced ideas. Many ideas were shared and many apps were created.
“SDN is the coolest thing that has happened in networking since Wi-Fi,” I told the students in a kickoff speech at the event. “Whatever iPhone and Android did for consumer applications, SDN is doing it for the networking world.”
Meru awarded the two top prizes to groups for the following two SDN Applications, built in just 36 hours:
The winner: Gatekeeper
Enabling firewall rules using a phone call, this real-world application marries the concepts of Twilio – a cloud based Unified Communication software and OpenDaylight, an open platform for network programmability.
The app will allow a user to call a number through “Twilio.” The caller has the option to start or stop network traffic flow on a virtual network. We imagine this being used as a means to instantly block traffic remotely. This is an example of a software defined network, using the Azure cloud platform to host. We used OpenDaylight and Mininet, a network emulator, to realize the network. Possible uses of Gatekeeper include restricting internet access for kids, blocking traffic for an individual user, and to immediately open or shut down traffic to a network.
Check out a working demo of Gatekeeper:
The runner up: Protector
This application restricts high bandwidth users from hogging the network.
The application monitors the port statistics to find out the load on a port of a device. Based on the port usage statistics, the corresponding user is restricted to a certain bandwidth usage.
Protector uses an OpenDaylight SDN Controller, which is connected to the underlying network using OpenFlow. Whenever high usage is detected, the application automatically restricts the bandwidth usage. The team built the application using OpenDaylight REST NBI & Java Scripting.
Seeing SDN inspire the students to think about building applications that can solve real-world end user challenges. We’ll see you at next year’s HackIllinois!
