Quality of service assurance for the next generation Internet

The provisioning for multimedia applications has been of increasing interest among researchers and Internet Service Providers. Through the migration from resource-based to service-driven networks, it has become evident that the Internet model should be enhanced to provide support for a variety of differentiated services that match applications and customer requirements, and not stay limited under the flat best-effort service that is currently provided. In this paper, we describe and critically appraise the major achievements of the efforts to introduce Quality of Service (QoS) assurance and provisioning within the Internet model. We then propose a research path for the creation of a network services management architecture, through which we can move towards a QoS-enabled network environment, offering support for a variety of different services, based on traffic characteristics and user expectations

A Survey on the Contributions of Software-Defined Networking to Traffic Engineering

Since the appearance of OpenFlow back in 2008, software-defined networking (SDN) has gained momentum. Although there are some discrepancies between the standards developing organizations working with SDN about what SDN is and how it is defined, they all outline traffic engineering (TE) as a key application. One of the most common objectives of TE is the congestion minimization, where techniques such as traffic splitting among multiple paths or advanced reservation systems are used. In such a scenario, this manuscript surveys the role of a comprehensive list of SDN protocols in TE solutions, in order to assess how these protocols can benefit TE. The SDN protocols have been categorized using the SDN architecture proposed by the open networking foundation, which differentiates among data-controller plane interfaces, application-controller plane interfaces, and management interfaces, in order to state how the interface type in which they operate influences TE. In addition, the impact of the SDN protocols on TE has been evaluated by comparing them with the path computation element (PCE)-based architecture. The PCE-based architecture has been selected to measure the impact of SDN on TE because it is the most novel TE architecture until the date, and because it already defines a set of metrics to measure the performance of TE solutions. We conclude that using the three types of interfaces simultaneously will result in more powerful and enhanced TE solutions, since they benefit TE in complementary ways.European Commission through the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (GN4) under Grant 691567 Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the Secure Deployment of Services Over SDN and NFV-based Networks Project S&NSEC under Grant TEC2013-47960-C4-3-

Management and Service-aware Networking Architectures (MANA) for Future Internet Position Paper: System Functions, Capabilities and Requirements

Future Internet (FI) research and development threads have recently been gaining momentum all over the world and as such the international race to create a new generation Internet is in full swing: GENI, Asia Future Internet, Future Internet Forum Korea, European Union Future Internet Assembly (FIA). This is a position paper identifying the research orientation with a time horizon of 10 years, together with the key challenges for the capabilities in the Management and Service-aware Networking Architectures (MANA) part of the Future Internet (FI) allowing for parallel and federated Internet(s)

Scheduling for Proportional Differentiated Services on the Internet

Proportional Differentiated Services can be provisioned in terms of bandwidth, delay, or packet loss. Several studies contributed schedulers and packet droppers that achieved proportional bandwidth, delay, or loss differentiation. However, all these schemes differentiated in terms of only one of the three metrics. A simple, unified, scalable, and robust scheme to simultaneously control all three metrics was felt important. By controlling just delay and packet loss, proportional differentiation can be achieved in terms of all three metrics. A robust adaptive scheduler for proportional delay differentiation services is presented. Proportional services are further policed by a class based packet dropper. The combination of the adaptive scheduler and the packet dropper treats different traffic classes proportionally in terms of all three metrics. Simulation experiments show that regardless of the network traffic characteristics, our scheme can effectively differentiate services in terms of bandwidth, delay, and loss simultaneously

The Beginnings and Prospective Ending of “End-to-End”: An Evolutionary Perspective On the Internet’s Architecture

The technology of “the Internet” is not static. Although its “end-to- end” architecture has made this “connection-less” communications system readily “extensible,” and highly encouraging to innovation both in hardware and software applications, there are strong pressures for engineering changes. Some of these are wanted to support novel transport services (e.g. voice telephony, real-time video); others would address drawbacks that appeared with opening of the Internet to public and commercial traffic - e.g., the difficulties of blocking delivery of offensive content, suppressing malicious actions (e.g. “denial of service” attacks), pricing bandwidth usage to reduce congestion. The expected gains from making “improvements” in the core of the network should be weighed against the loss of the social and economic benefits that derive from the “end-to-end” architectural design. Even where technological “fixes” can be placed at the networks’ edges, the option remains to search for alternative, institutional mechanisms of governing conduct in cyberspace.

Traffic Engineering in G-MPLS networks with QoS guarantees

In this paper a new Traffic Engineering (TE) scheme to efficiently route sub-wavelength requests with different QoS requirements is proposed for G-MPLS networks. In most previous studies on TE based on dynamic traffic grooming, the objectives were to minimize the rejection probability by respecting the constraints of the optical node architecture, but without considering service differentiation. In practice, some high-priority (HP) connections can instead be characterized by specific constraints on the maximum tolerable end-to-end delay and packet-loss ratio. The proposed solution consists of a distributed two-stage scheme: each time a new request arrives, an on-line dynamic grooming scheme finds a route which fulfills the QoS requirements. If a HP request is blocked at the ingress router, a preemption algorithm is executed locally in order to create room for this traffic. The proposed preemption mechanism minimizes the network disruption, both in term of number of rerouted low-priority connections and new set-up lightpaths, and the signaling complexity. Extensive simulation experiments are performed to demonstrate the efficiency of our scheme