After a quick revisitation of the evolving history behind Software Defined Networking (SDN), this talk will focus on ongoing open-source research developments leveraging P4/Tofino programmable hardware and recent advances in support of 6G research. The talk will explore hardware-based network emulation and traffic generation from theoretical and practical perspectives, covering research and educational practices in courses/lectures that leverage experimental network environments based on programmable networking technologies (e.g., OpenFlow, P4). The talk will dive into emulation tools like the P4 Programmable Patch Panel (P7) along with the recent PIPO-TG and P4R traffic generators, altogether contributing to a rich experimental environment for education and research purposes. The resulting toolbox supports ongoing research efforts beyond 5G, covering different network characteristics, custom data plane pipelines, realistic and challenging traffic patterns (e.g., TSN, stateful TCP connections), and diverse application workloads (e.g., VR/XR, QUIC, 360 and Point-Cloud Video streaming)

About Christian Esteve Rothenberg

Christian Esteve Rothenberg is an Associate Professor and head of the Information & Networking Technologies Research & Innovation Group (INTRIG) at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (FEEC) of the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (University of Campinas), where he received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2010. He holds a Telecommunication Engineering degree from the Technical University of Madrid (ETSIT – UPM), Spain, and an M.Sc. (Dipl. Ing.) degree in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from the Darmstadt University of Technology (TUD), Germany, 2006. Christian has contributed to several international patents, co-authored three books, and more than 200 scientific publications, including top-tier journals and networking conferences such as SIGCOMM and INFOCOM, altogether featuring 13,000+ citations (h-index: 40+, i10-index: 100+). Since 2023, he is the PI of the FAPESP Engineering Research Center SMARTNESS (SMART NEtworks and ServiceS for 2030) co-funded by Ericsson with an expected duration until 2033.

This event will be conducted in English