Building Programmable Wireless Networks: An Architectural Survey

In recent times, there have been a lot of efforts for improving the ossified Internet architecture in a bid to sustain unstinted growth and innovation. A major reason for the perceived architectural ossification is the lack of ability to program the network as a system. This situation has resulted partly from historical decisions in the original Internet design which emphasized decentralized network operations through co-located data and control planes on each network device. The situation for wireless networks is no different resulting in a lot of complexity and a plethora of largely incompatible wireless technologies. The emergence of "programmable wireless networks", that allow greater flexibility, ease of management and configurability, is a step in the right direction to overcome the aforementioned shortcomings of the wireless networks. In this paper, we provide a broad overview of the architectures proposed in literature for building programmable wireless networks focusing primarily on three popular techniques, i.e., software defined networks, cognitive radio networks, and virtualized networks. This survey is a self-contained tutorial on these techniques and its applications. We also discuss the opportunities and challenges in building next-generation programmable wireless networks and identify open research issues and future research directions.Comment: 19 page

TCPSnitch: Dissecting the Usage of the Socket API

Networked applications interact with the TCP/IP stack through the socket API. Over the years, various extensions have been added to this popular API. In this paper, we propose and implement the TCPSnitch software that tracks the interactions between Linux and Android applications and the TCP/IP stack. We collect a dataset containing the interactions produced by more than 120 different applications. Our analysis reveals that applications use a variety of API calls. On Android, many applications use various socket options even if the Java API does not expose them directly. TCPSnitch and the associated dataset are publicly available.Comment: See https://www.tcpsnitch.or

XMILE:An XML-based approach for programmable networks

In this paper we describe an XML-based platform for dynamic active node policy updates. XML supports the definitionof specific policy languages, their extension to satisfy new needs and the management of deployed policies on differentactive nodes. We show an example of the management of router packet forwarding policies where the XML policiesthat drive the packet routing are updated at run-time on the active nodes depending on the network status. The platformdecouples policy management, which is handled through XML interpretation, from packet forwarding that, forperformance reasons has to be implemented in more efficient languages

Active networks: an evolution of the internet

Active Networks can be seen as an evolution of the classical model of packet-switched networks. The traditional and ”passive” network model is based on a static definition of the network node behaviour. Active Networks propose an “active” model where the intermediate nodes (switches and routers) can load and execute user code contained in the data units (packets). Active Networks are a programmable network model, where bandwidth and computation are both considered shared network resources. This approach opens up new interesting research fields. This paper gives a short introduction of Active Networks, discusses the advantages they introduce and presents the research advances in this field

A practical approach to network-based processing

The usage of general-purpose processors externally attached to routers to play virtually the role of active coprocessors seems a safe and cost-effective approach to add active network capabilities to existing routers. This paper reviews this router-assistant way of making active nodes, addresses the benefits and limitations of this technique, and describes a new platform based on it using an enhanced commercial router. The features new to this type of architecture are transparency, IPv4 and IPv6 support, and full control over layer 3 and above. A practical experience with two applications for path characterization and a transport gateway managing multi-QoS is described.Most of this work has been funded by the IST project GCAP (Global Communication Architecture and Protocols for new QoS services over IPv6 networks) IST-1999-10 504. Further development and application to practical scenarios is being supported by IST project Opium (Open Platform for Integration of UMTS Middleware) IST-2001-36063 and the Spanish MCYT under projects TEL99-0988-C02-01 and AURAS TIC2001-1650-C02-01.Publicad

Light microscopy--a prototype for a remote image diagnosis system

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1997.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 67-69).by Alexander B. Zakharov.M.Eng

An Architecture for the Integration of Internet and Telecommunication Services

In this paper, we propose an architecture for hybrid services, i.e., services that span many network technologies, especially the PSTN and the Internet. These services will play an important role in the future, because they leverage on the existing infrastructures, rather than requiring brand-new and sophisticated mechanisms to be deployed. We explore a few issues related to hybrid services and propose a platform, as well as a set of components, to facilitate their creation and deployment. The existing infrastructure is only required to generate specific events when requests for hybrid services are detected. We present the design of s service layer, based on Java, that handles the treatment of these special requests. Our service layer is provided with a set of generic components realized as Java Beans. Hence, we can provide hybrid services without changing the existing infrastructure. We illustrate this strength of our architecture by discussing the call forwarding service