Project SENDATE

Large Data Centers (DCs) are forming the most important control centers of the Internet nowadays. Within DCs, business as well as private data is stored, edited, forwarded, and processed. Although current DCs have a huge computing power, massive storage capacities, and an enormous performance based on centrally stored data, they are located far away from the customer, use the network only for transport, and are mostly run by non-European companies. This leads to low flexibility, long delays to customers, and security concerns.

New application scenarios of our digital society such as Industrial Internet, mobile connected objects, Internet of Things, health applications, and especially 5G lead to a huge number of end devices and an enormous increase of traffic volume. The high demands on security, location awareness, service guarantees, flexibility, and latency require a convergence of telecommunication networks and IT as well as distributed data centers, which are placed close to the customers. 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 center approach to support the upcoming application scenarios.

The goal of the SENDATE research program is to provide the scientific, technical, and technological concepts and solutions for

A clean-slate architecture supporting the application scenario demands
Intra-DC -security, -control, -management, and -orchestration
Inter-DC -security, -control, -management, and -orchestration
Placement, control, and management of Virtual Network Functions (VNF)
High speed transport networks to interconnect servers in a DC, data centers together, and the end users.

This includes on the one hand the development of a flexible control-plane using SDN, an on the other hand a powerful data-plane with a high flexibility. Security is an integral part of all sub-parts.