OpenFlow is in the proof-of-concept stage but someday could be used in business networks to engineer traffic, says , an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford University.

OpenFlow is part of the initiative set up to consider how the Internet might be re-engineered to make it more responsive to how it is actually used.

Researchers devised OpenFlow as a way to test out new network protocols on existing networks without disrupting production applications. The only other option is to set up separate infrastructure on which to run experiments, a costly alternative.

OpenFlow does two things. It lets users define flows and determine what path those flows take through the network -- all without interrupting normal traffic.

Policies can be crafted to find paths with certain characteristics such as more bandwidth, less latency and fewer hops so they use up less power, he says.