Networking and Communications

The networks over which enterprises and consumers are creating, accessing, and sharing information are built predominantly on decades-old architectural principles and protocols. These network infrastructures are not designed to support today’s bandwidth-hungry applications, nor are they flexible enough to adapt to increased customer appetites for mobility, security, and manageability.

Data centers are using multiple networks to cater to a wide variety of traffic, including server communications, storage traffic, cluster messaging and management, and more. Because these multiple networks need different types of switches and cabling, the result is excessively high capital and operational expenses; they also waste power and rack space, often require multiple network administrators; and become difficult to scale.

HP Labs Networking research seeks to create the next generation of network architectures and communications technologies, which provide predictable, high-quality and power-efficient networking while reducing management complexity. Our research is aimed at delivering network innovations an order of magnitude faster than what is possible today and at a tenth of what it costs today. The goal is to provide customers with a fully and rapidly customizable network fabric that can be re-programmed to meet their evolving, and perhaps yet unknown, requirements.

This research area is targeting a rapidly customizable, programmable network framework that revolutionizes the way in which networks are designed, built, and operated today---networks in which behaviors are completely predictable, and new features and applications can be introduced quickly and cost-effectively. As a result, customers will have greater control over their networks and data centers. Our research in Networking includes one project:

Networking and Communications Big Bet

Seamless Mobility

We envision eliminating connectivity challenges for mobile users and easing their interaction with an increasing number of mobile devices, apps, users and hosted services. Our Seamless Mobility project aims to seamlessly integrate the use of a Mobile Personal Grid for media-rich applications with enterprise infrastructure and software. Mobility introduces fundamental technical challenges to achieving this vision: users are frequently and simultaneously switching between multiple dimensions of mobility; access networks (both public and private), multiple devices (smartphone, tablet, laptop), and multiple personas (business, personal). We address these challenges by innovating in three key areas; the mobile device networking stack, wireless network infrastructure, and context-aware personal assistants within the ‘mobile’ cloud.

Flexible Programmable Networks

The Flexible Programmable Networks project aims to deliver a robust, flexible, adaptive, open, scalable, and easily programmable wired and wireless network platform – one that is centrally controlled. This will allow the rapid, easy, and cost-effective introduction of new network features, supporting current and future network requirements. And it will provide real-time, holistic, and automated network management; meet the performance needs of bandwidth-intensive new media-rich applications; enable increasingly demanding mobility, virtualization, and cloud computing requirements; and enable a new level of end-to-end security capabilities. The project’s goal is a major disruption of the basic networking platform.