By MC2 Michael Ehrlich

NPS Department of Computer Science Professor and Associate Chair Dr. Geoffrey Xie has been awarded the Test of Time Award by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM) for his contributions to the paper, "A Clean Slate 4D Approach to Network Control and Management," written more than 10 years ago. The ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Award recognizes papers published 10 to 12 years ago whose content is still a vibrant and useful contribution today.

"I co-wrote the paper in 2004 with eight other researchers from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and AT&T Research Labs while spending a one-year sabbatical at CMU," said Xie. "This paper led to a resurgence of interest in the topic of separated data and control planes to better manage networks that developed into software defined networking."

Computers and networking have grown in staggering ways over the past 10 years in their versatility, complexity and application. Through it all, Xie explains how his co-authored work still remains relevant today.

"The paper is a summary of our insights, and more importantly, it presents a new network architecture laying the foundation for software defined networking, which has had a lasting impact on the design and control of enterprise networks, as well as emerging cloud technology."