University of Würzburg’s Institute of Computer Science is working to make secure and efficient networks for the internet of the future. Two of its projects received nearly EUR 750,000 worth of funding. Large data centres are the major checkpoints of the Internet. They save, process and forward business data and private information. Today’s data centres have huge computing and storage capacities and are usually located in remote places far away from their customers. Already today, these data centres have a lot to cope with and the end is not in sight. They have to serve an increasing number of smart phones, tablet computers and other terminal devices causing the associated Internet traffic to grow continuously. New Internet apps in the environment of industrial and health systems for example contribute to this trend.

 The project aims to bring data centres closer to users. For data centres to operate in a secure, flexible and reliable manner, Telecommunications and IT will have to be consolidated. It also focuses on decentralizing the computing and storage capacities. A new research consortium SENDATE (Secure Networking for a Data center cloud in Europe) is seeking to develop network architecture and technologies for secure and flexible distributed data centres. Innovative approaches such as Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) in combination with Software Defined Networking (SDN) are the basis for a secure, flexible, low latency, and locality-aware distributed data centre approach to support the upcoming application scenarios. The project is managed by Nokia Solutions and Networks GmbH & Co. KG. Set to run until February 2019, it is financed by various research sponsors within the scope of the Celtic-Plus IKT research cluster. The SENDATE-PLANETS subproject involves a JMU research team from the Department of Communication Networks which develops security mechanisms for NFV/SDN networks. The scientists also investigate the development, operation and optimization of virtual network functions and their positioning in distributed data centres.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) enables implementing flexible, virtualized and programmable networks in the Internet of the future. To study the possibilities and performance of network management using SDN, department also collaborates with InfoSim GmbH & Co. KG in the SDN-Perf project (Performance of SDN). The medium-sized company located in Würzburg has specialized in developing network management software.

Source : http://phys.org/