For years, computer scientists have dreamed up ways to improve networks' speed, reliability, energy efficiency, and security. But their schemes have generally remained lab projects, because it's been impossible to test them on a large enough scale to see if they'd work: the routers and switches at the core of the Internet are locked down, their software the intellectual property of companies such as Cisco and Hewlett-Packard.rnFrustrated by this inability to fiddle with Internet routing in the real world, Stanford computer scientist Nick McKeown and colleagues developed a standard called OpenFlow that essentially opens up the Internet to researchers, allowing them to define data flows using software-a sort of "software-defined networking." Installing a small piece of OpenFlow firmware (software embedded in hardware) gives engineers access to flow tables, rules that tell switches and routers how to direct network traffic. Yet it protects the proprietary routing instructions that differentiate one company's hardware from another.
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