
Gábor Rétvári received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME), Budapest, Hungary, in 1999 and 2007, respectively. He is now a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Telecommunications and Media Informatics, BME. His research interests include routing and switching in packet networks, cloud-native networking and the service mesh, switch and router design, cloud computing and software-defined networks, and all applications of theoretical computer science to real-world problems. He is a Perl hacker, maintaining numerous open source scientific tools written in Perl, C and Haskell.
Department of Telecommunications and Media InformaticsBudapest University of Technology and Economics
Budapest, Hungary
H-1117 Budapest, Magyar Tudósok krt. 2.
Phone: +36-1-463-2403
Twitter: @littleredspam
Email:

News
- L7mp, our new multiprotocol service mesh for legacy telco applications, gets its first public announcement at ServiceMeshCon NA 2020, colocated with KubeCon/CloudNativeCon NA 2020. Presentation is now online.
- Our paper Full-stack SDN: The Next Big Challenge?, challenging the current practice of software-defined networking being restricted to the lower 3 layers of the protocol stack (Link, Network and partially Transport), has been accepted to ACM SOSR'20. The motivation for this work is the recent service-mesh hype in the cloud-native community and whether there is anything we could do about it in the SDN area. Turns our we can: we argue that it is time to extend SDN all the way up into the Application layer, which has all sorts of interesting consequences. This is joint work with Gianni Antichi from Queen Mary University, London. See the full paper, the talk and the slides online.
- Amazing news, we got accepted to USENIX NSDI'20! The paper is titled Batchy: Batch-scheduling Data Flow Graphs with Service-level Objectives and it is just about what the title says: feeding packet processing functions in a software switch with as large packet-batches as possible, and thereby exploiting well-known batch-processing gains, subject to delay constraints. This is joint work with Tamás Lévai, Barath Raghavan and Felicián Németh. See the full paper and the obligatory tweet!
- Two papers accepted to ACM CoNEXT'19. The first one is a short paper on removing inherent redundancy from match-action programs in a systematic way, very similar to how it's done in relational database normalization, and the other is a full paper on exploiting certain algorithmic corner cases in the venerable tuple-space-search packet classification algorithm for malicious purposes and whether there's anything one can do about it.
- Take a look at the The Internet Routing Entropy Monitor for 6 years of scalability statistics and historical trends from the Internet data plane.
Recent publications
See selected publications and a full publication list (also with abstracts).
- András Gulyás, József Bíró, Gábor Rétvári, Márton Novák, Attila Kőrösi, Mariann Slíz, Zalán Heszberger: The role of detours in individual human navigation patterns of complex networks, Nature Scientific Reports, 2020.
- Gianni Antichi and Gábor Rétvári: Full-stack SDN: The next big challenge?, ACM SOSR, 2020.
- Tamás Lévai, Felicián Németh, Barath Raghavan, and Gábor Rétvári: Batchy: Batch-scheduling data flow graphs with service-level objectives, USENIX NSDI, 2020.
- Felicián Németh, Marco Chiesa, and Gábor Rétvári: Normal forms for match-action programs, ACM CoNEXT, 2019.
- Levente Csikor, Dinil Mon Divakaran, Min Suk Kang, Attila Kőrösi, Balázs Sonkoly, Dávid Haja, Dimitrios P. Pezaros, Stefan Schmid, and Gábor Rétvári: Tuple space explosion: a denial-of-service attack against a software packet classifier, ACM CoNEXT, 2019.
- Leonardo Linguaglossa, Stanislav Lange, Salvatore Pontarelli, Gábor Rétvári, Dario Rossi, Thomas Zinner, Roberto Bifulco, Michael Jarschel and Giuseppe Bianchi: Survey of performance acceleration techniques for network function virtualization, Proceedings of the IEEE, 2019.
- János Tapolcai, Gábor Rétvári, Péter Babarczi and Erika Bérczi-Kovács: Scalable and efficient multipath routing via redundant trees, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 2019.
- Kashyap Thimmaraju, Saad Hermak, Gábor Rétvári and Stefan Schmid: MTS: Bringing multi-tenancy to virtual networking, USENIX ATC, 2019.
- Tamás Lévai, Gergely Pongrácz, Péter Megyesi, Péter Vörös, Sándor Laki, Felicián Németh and Gábor Rétvári: The price for programmability in the software data plane: The vendor perspective, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 2018.
- Máté Nagy, János Tapolcai and Gábor Rétvári: Node virtualization for IP level resilience, IEEE/ACM Trans. Netw., 2018.
- Marco Chiesa, Gábor Rétvári and Michael Schapira: Oblivious routing in IP networks, IEEE/ACM Trans. Netw., 2018.
- Attila Csoma, Attila Kőrösi, Gábor Rétvári, Zalán Heszberger, József Bíró, Mariann Slíz, Anrea Avena-Koenigsberger, Alessandra Griffa, Patric Hagmann and András Gulyás: Routes obey hierarchy in complex networks, Nature Scientific Reports, 2017.
- Gábor Rétvári, László Molnár, Gergely Pongrácz and Gábor Enyedi: Dynamic compilation and optimization of packet processing programs, ACM SIGCOMM - NetPL, 2017.
- Marco Chiesa, Gábor Rétvári and Michael Schapira: Lying your way to better traffic engineering, ACM CoNEXT, 2016.
- László Molnár, Gergely Pongrácz, Gábor Enyedi, Zoltán Kis, Levente Csikor, Ferenc Juhász, Attila Kőrösi and Gábor Rétvári: Dataplane specialization for high performance OpenFlow software switching, ACM SIGCOMM, 2016.
- András Gulyás, József Bíró, Attila Kőrösi, Gábor Rétvári and Dimitri Krioukov: Navigable networks as Nash equilibria of navigation games, Nature Communications, 2015.
- András Gulyás, Gábor Rétvári, Zalán Heszberger and Rachit Agarwal: On the scalability of routing with policies, IEEE/ACM Trans. Netw., 2015.
- Gábor Rétvári, Dávid Szabó, András Gulyás, Attila Kőrösi and János Tapolcai: An information-theoretic approach to routing scalability, ACM HotNets, 2014.
- Gábor Rétvári, János Tapolcai, András Kőrösi, András Majdán and Zalán Heszberger: Compressing IP forwarding tables: Towards entropy bounds and beyond, ACM SIGCOMM, 2013.
- Gábor Rétvári, János Tapolcai, Gábor Enyedi and András Császár: IP Fast ReRoute: Loop Free Alternates revisited, IEEE INFOCOM, 2011.
- Gábor Rétvári, András Gulyás, Zalán Heszberger, Márton Csernai and József Bíró: Compact policy routing, ACM PODC, 2011.
Courses
Projects
- The Internet Routing Entropy Monitor - statistics, charts and downloadable forwarding tables samples from the Internet data plane collected daily from 20 vantage points.
- Math::GLPK - Perl extension for the GNU Linear Programming Kit (GLPK).
- Math::MatrixSparse - a pure Perl module implementing sparse matrices.
- Lemon::Graph - Perl extension for LEMON, a combinatorial optimization and graph library.
- XML::XDV - the XML Data Visualization framework.