A Novel Incrementally-Deployable Multi-granularity Multihoming Framework for the Future Internet

Abstract-Multihoming practice in the current Internet is limited to hosts and autonomous systems (ASs). It is "connectivity-oriented" without support for user or data multihoming. However, the swift migration of Internet from "connectivity-oriented" to "content-oriented" pattern urges to incorporate user and data level multihoming support in architecture designs instead of just through ad-hoc patches. In this paper, based on our previous research experience, we expand the multihoming concepts to both user and data levels based on the "multiple points of attachment" in a way similar to host multihoming. We propose a new incrementally-deployable multihoming framework by introducing a "realm" concept. The high-level user and data multihoming support can be built on top of the host and AS level multihoming in an incrementally-deployable and flexibly-assembled manner. Realms form a hierarchy of functionally dependable blocks. We define a new dimension of building block--slice which is an incrementally implementable functional unit for multihoming. Besides the long-term support for user and data multihoming, the first step deployment of the new framework is also able to address the short-term routing scalability challenge by reducing the total inter-domain routing table size gradually

Software Defined Application Delivery Networking

In this thesis we present the architecture, design, and prototype implementation details of AppFabric. AppFabric is a next generation application delivery platform for easily creating, managing and controlling massively distributed and very dynamic application deployments that may span multiple datacenters. Over the last few years, the need for more flexibility, finer control, and automatic management of large (and messy) datacenters has stimulated technologies for virtualizing the infrastructure components and placing them under software-based management and control; generically called Software-defined Infrastructure (SDI). However, current applications are not designed to leverage this dynamism and flexibility offered by SDI and they mostly depend on a mix of different techniques including manual configuration, specialized appliances (middleboxes), and (mostly) proprietary middleware solutions together with a team of extremely conscientious and talented system engineers to get their applications deployed and running. AppFabric, 1) automates the whole control and management stack of application deployment and delivery, 2) allows application architects to define logical workflows consisting of application servers, message-level middleboxes, packet-level middleboxes and network services (both, local and wide-area) composed over application-level routing policies, and 3) provides the abstraction of an application cloud that allows the application to dynamically (and automatically) expand and shrink its distributed footprint across multiple geographically distributed datacenters operated by different cloud providers. The architecture consists of a hierarchical control plane system called Lighthouse and a fully distributed data plane design (with no special hardware components such as service orchestrators, load balancers, message brokers, etc.) called OpenADN . The current implementation (under active development) consists of ~10000 lines of python and C code. AppFabric will allow applications to fully leverage the opportunities provided by modern virtualized Software-Defined Infrastructures. It will serve as the platform for deploying massively distributed, and extremely dynamic next generation application use-cases, including: Internet-of-Things/Cyber-Physical Systems: Through support for managing distributed gather-aggregate topologies common to most Internet-of-Things(IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems(CPS) use-cases. By their very nature, IoT and CPS use cases are massively distributed and have different levels of computation and storage requirements at different locations. Also, they have variable latency requirements for their different distributed sites. Some services, such as device controllers, in an Iot/CPS application workflow may need to gather, process and forward data under near-real time constraints and hence need to be as close to the device as possible. Other services may need more computation to process aggregated data to drive long term business intelligence functions. AppFabric has been designed to provide support for such very dynamic, highly diversified and massively distributed application use-cases. Network Function Virtualization: Through support for heterogeneous workflows, application-aware networking, and network-aware application deployments, AppFabric will enable new partnerships between Application Service Providers (ASPs) and Network Service Providers (NSPs). An application workflow in AppFabric may comprise of application services, packet and message-level middleboxes, and network transport services chained together over an application-level routing substrate. The Application-level routing substrate allows policy-based service chaining where the application may specify policies for routing their application traffic over different services based on application-level content or context. Virtual worlds/multiplayer games: Through support for creating, managing and controlling dynamic and distributed application clouds needed by these applications. AppFabric allows the application to easily specify policies to dynamically grow and shrink the application\u27s footprint over different geographical sites, on-demand. Mobile Apps: Through support for extremely diversified and very dynamic application contexts typical of such applications. Also, AppFabric provides support for automatically managing massively distributed service deployment and controlling application traffic based on application-level policies. This allows mobile applications to provide the best Quality-of-Experience to its users without This thesis is the first to handle and provide a complete solution for such a complex and relevant architectural problem that is expected to touch each of our lives by enabling exciting new application use-cases that are not possible today. Also, AppFabric is a non-proprietary platform that is expected to spawn lots of innovations both in the design of the platform itself and the features it provides to applications. AppFabric still needs many iterations, both in terms of design and implementation maturity. This thesis is not the end of journey for AppFabric but rather just the beginning

De-ossifying the Internet Transport Layer : A Survey and Future Perspectives

ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful suggestions and comments.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Cooperative resource pooling in multihomed mobile networks

The ubiquity of multihoming amongst mobile devices presents a unique opportunity for users to co-operate, sharing their available Internet connectivity, forming multihomed mobile networks on demand. This model provides users with vast potential to increase the quality of service they receive. Despite this, such mobile networks are typically underutilized and overly restrictive, as additional Internet connectivity options are predominantly ignored and selected gateways are both immutable and incapable of meeting the demand of the mobile network. This presents a number of research challenges, as users look to maximize their quality of experience, while balancing both the financial cost and power consumption associated with utilizing a diverse set of heterogeneous Internet connectivity options. In this thesis we present a novel architecture for mobile networks, the contribution of which is threefold. Firstly, we ensure the available Internet connectivity is appropriately advertised, building a routing overlay which allows mobile devices to access any available network resource. Secondly, we leverage the benefits of multipath communications, providing the mobile device with increased throughput, additional resilience and seamless mobility. Finally, we provide a multihomed framework, enabling policy driven network resource management and path selection on a per application basis. Policy driven resource management provides a rich and descriptive approach, allowing the context of the network and the device to be taken into account when making routing decisions at the edge of the Internet. The aim of this framework, is to provide an efficient and flexible approach to the allocation of applications to the optimal network resource, no matter where it resides in a mobile network. Furthermore, we investigate the benefits of path selection, facilitating the policy framework to choose the optimal network resource for specific applications. Through our evaluation, we prove that our approach to advertising Internet connectivity in a mobile network is both efficient and capable of increasing the utilization of the available network capacity. We then demonstrate that our policy driven approach to resource management and path selection can further improve the user’s quality of experience, by tailoring network resource usage to meet their specific needs

Multihoming with ILNP in FreeBSD

Multihoming allows nodes to be multiply connected to the network. It forms the basis of features which can improve network responsiveness and robustness; e.g. load balancing and fail-over, which can be considered as a choice between network locations. However, IP today assumes that IP addresses specify both network location and node identity. Therefore, these features must be implemented at routers. This dissertation considers an alternative based on the multihoming approach of the Identifier Locator Network Protocol (ILNP). ILNP is one of many proposals for a split between network location and node identity. However, unlike other proposals, ILNP removes the use of IP addresses as they are used today. To date, ILNP has not been implemented within an operating system stack. I produce the first implementation of ILNP in FreeBSD, based on a superset of IPv6 – ILNPv6 – and demonstrate a key feature of ILNP: multihoming as a first class function of the operating system, rather than being implemented as a routing function as it is today. To evaluate the multihoming capability, I demonstrate one important application of multihoming – load distribution – at three levels of network hierarchy including individual hosts, a singleton Site Border Router (SBR), and a novel, dynamically instantiated, distributed SBR (dSBR). For each level, I present empirical results from a hardware testbed; metrics include latency, throughput, loss and reordering. I compare performance with unmodified IPv6 and NPTv6. Finally, I evaluate the feasibility of dSBR-ILNPv6 as an alternative to existing multihoming approaches, based on measurements of the dSBR’s responsiveness to changes in site connectivity. We find that multihoming can be implemented by individual hosts and/or SBRs, without requiring additional routing state as is the case today, and without any significant additional load or overhead compared to unicast IPv6

Traffic Re-engineering: Extending Resource Pooling Through the Application of Re-feedback

Parallelism pervades the Internet, yet efficiently pooling this increasing path diversity has remained elusive. With no holistic solution for resource pooling, each layer of the Internet architecture attempts to balance traffic according to its own needs, potentially at the expense of others. From the edges, traffic is implicitly pooled over multiple paths by retrieving content from different sources. Within the network, traffic is explicitly balanced across multiple links through the use of traffic engineering. This work explores how the current architecture can be realigned to facilitate resource pooling at both network and transport layers, where tension between stakeholders is strongest. The central theme of this thesis is that traffic engineering can be performed more efficiently, flexibly and robustly through the use of re-feedback. A cross-layer architecture is proposed for sharing the responsibility for resource pooling across both hosts and network. Building on this framework, two novel forms of traffic management are evaluated. Efficient pooling of traffic across paths is achieved through the development of an in-network congestion balancer, which can function in the absence of multipath transport. Network and transport mechanisms are then designed and implemented to facilitate path fail-over, greatly improving resilience without requiring receiver side cooperation. These contributions are framed by a longitudinal measurement study which provides evidence for many of the design choices taken. A methodology for scalably recovering flow metrics from passive traces is developed which in turn is systematically applied to over five years of interdomain traffic data. The resulting findings challenge traditional assumptions on the preponderance of congestion control on resource sharing, with over half of all traffic being constrained by limits other than network capacity. All of the above represent concerted attempts to rethink and reassert traffic engineering in an Internet where competing solutions for resource pooling proliferate. By delegating responsibilities currently overloading the routing architecture towards hosts and re-engineering traffic management around the core strengths of the network, the proposed architectural changes allow the tussle surrounding resource pooling to be drawn out without compromising the scalability and evolvability of the Internet

Use of locator/identifier separation to improve the future internet routing system

The Internet evolved from its early days of being a small research network to become a critical infrastructure many organizations and individuals rely on. One dimension of this evolution is the continuous growth of the number of participants in the network, far beyond what the initial designers had in mind. While it does work today, it is widely believed that the current design of the global routing system cannot scale to accommodate future challenges. In 2006 an Internet Architecture Board (IAB) workshop was held to develop a shared understanding of the Internet routing system scalability issues faced by the large backbone operators. The participants documented in RFC 4984 their belief that "routing scalability is the most important problem facing the Internet today and must be solved." A potential solution to the routing scalability problem is ending the semantic overloading of Internet addresses, by separating node location from identity. Several proposals exist to apply this idea to current Internet addressing, among which the Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) is the only one already being shipped in production routers. Separating locators from identifiers results in another level of indirection, and introduces a new problem: how to determine location, when the identity is known. The first part of our work analyzes existing proposals for systems that map identifiers to locators and proposes an alternative system, within the LISP ecosystem. We created a large-scale Internet topology simulator and used it to compare the performance of three mapping systems: LISP-DHT, LISP+ALT and the proposed LISP-TREE. We analyzed and contrasted their architectural properties as well. The monitoring projects that supplied Internet routing table growth data over a large timespan inspired us to create LISPmon, a monitoring platform aimed at collecting, storing and presenting data gathered from the LISP pilot network, early in the deployment of the LISP protocol. The project web site and collected data is publicly available and will assist researchers in studying the evolution of the LISP mapping system. We also document how the newly introduced LISP network elements fit into the current Internet, advantages and disadvantages of different deployment options, and how the proposed transition mechanism scenarios could affect the evolution of the global routing system. This work is currently available as an active Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Internet Draft. The second part looks at the problem of efficient one-to-many communications, assuming a routing system that implements the above mentioned locator/identifier split paradigm. We propose a network layer protocol for efficient live streaming. It is incrementally deployable, with changes required only in the same border routers that should be upgraded to support locator/identifier separation. Our proof-of-concept Linux kernel implementation shows the feasibility of the protocol, and our comparison to popular peer-to-peer live streaming systems indicates important savings in inter-domain traffic. We believe LISP has considerable potential of getting adopted, and an important aspect of this work is how it might contribute towards a better mapping system design, by showing the weaknesses of current favorites and proposing alternatives. The presented results are an important step forward in addressing the routing scalability problem described in RFC 4984, and improving the delivery of live streaming video over the Internet

Global connectivity architecture of mobile personal devices

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2008.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Includes bibliographical references (p. 193-207).The Internet's architecture, designed in the days of large, stationary computers tended by technically savvy and accountable administrators, fails to meet the demands of the emerging ubiquitous computing era. Nontechnical users now routinely own multiple personal devices, many of them mobile, and need to share information securely among them using interactive, delay-sensitive applications.Unmanaged Internet Architecture (UIA) is a novel, incrementally deployable network architecture for modern personal devices, which reconsiders three architectural cornerstones: naming, routing, and transport. UIA augments the Internet's global name system with a personal name system, enabling users to build personal administrative groups easily and intuitively, to establish secure bindings between his devices and with other users' devices, and to name his devices and his friends much like using a cell phone's address book. To connect personal devices reliably, even while mobile, behind NATs or firewalls, or connected via isolated ad hoc networks, UIA gives each device a persistent, location-independent identity, and builds an overlay routing service atop IP to resolve and route among these identities. Finally, to support today's interactive applications built using concurrent transactions and delay-sensitive media streams, UIA introduces a new structured stream transport abstraction, which solves the efficiency and responsiveness problems of TCP streams and the functionality limitations of UDP datagrams. Preliminary protocol designs and implementations demonstrate UIA's features and benefits. A personal naming prototype supports easy and portable group management, allowing use of personal names alongside global names in unmodified Internet applications. A prototype overlay router leverages the naming layer's social network to provide efficient ad hoc connectivity in restricted but important common-case scenarios.(cont) Simulations of more general routing protocols--one inspired by distributed hash tables, one based on recent compact routing theory--explore promising generalizations to UIA's overlay routing. A library-based prototype of UIA's structured stream transport enables incremental deployment in either OS infrastructure or applications, and demonstrates the responsiveness benefits of the new transport abstraction via dynamic prioritization of interactive web downloads. Finally, an exposition and experimental evaluation of NAT traversal techniques provides insight into routing optimizations useful in UIA and elsewhere.by Bryan Alexander Ford.Ph.D

Towards enabling cross-layer information sharing to improve today's content delivery systems

Content is omnipresent and without content the Internet would not be what it is today. End users consume content throughout the day, from checking the latest news on Twitter in the morning, to streaming music in the background (while working), to streaming movies or playing online games in the evening, and to using apps (e.g., sleep trackers) even while we sleep in the night. All of these different kinds of content have very specific and different requirements on a transport—on one end, online gaming often requires a low latency connection but needs little throughput, and, on the other, streaming a video requires high throughput, but it performs quite poorly under packet loss. Yet, all content is transferred opaquely over the same transport, adhering to a strict separation of network layers. Even a modern transport protocol such as Multi-Path TCP, which is capable of utilizing multiple paths, cannot take the (above) requirements or needs of that content into account for its path selection. In this work we challenge the layer separation and show that sharing information across the layers is beneficial for consuming web and video content. To this end, we created an event-based simulator for evaluating how applications can make informed decisions about which interfaces to use delivering different content based on a set of pre-defined policies that encode the (performance) requirements or needs of that content. Our policies achieve speedups of a factor of two in 20% of our cases, have benefits in more than 50%, and create no overhead in any of the cases. For video content we created a full streaming system that allows an even finer grained information sharing between the transport and the application. Our streaming system, called VOXEL, enables applications to select dynamically and on a frame granularity which video data to transfer based on the current network conditions. VOXEL drastically reduces video stalls in the 90th-percentile by up to 97% while not sacrificing the stream's visual fidelity. We confirmed our performance improvements in a real-user study where 84% of the participants clearly preferred watching videos streamed with VOXEL over the state-of-the-art.Inhalte sind allgegenwärtig und ohne Inhalte wäre das Internet nicht das, was es heute ist. Endbenutzer konsumieren Inhalte von früh bis spät - es beginnt am Morgen mit dem Lesen der neusten Nachrichten auf Twitter, dem online hören von Musik während der Arbeit, wird fortgeführt mit dem Schauen von Filmen über Online-Streaming Dienste oder dem spielen von Mehrspieler Online Spielen am Abend, und sogar dem, mit dem Internet synchronisierten, Überwachens des eigenen Schlafes in der Nacht. All diese verschiedenen Arten von Inhalten haben sehr spezifische und unterschiedliche Ansprüche an den Transport über das Internet - auf der einen Seite sind es Online Spiele, die eine sehr geringe Latenz, aber kaum Durchsatz benötigen, auf der Anderen gibt es Video-Streaming Dienste, die einen sehr hohen Datendurchsatz benötigen, aber, sehr nur schlecht mit Paketverlust umgehen können. Jedoch werden all diese Inhalte über den selben, undurchsichtigen, Transportweg übertragen, weil an eine strikte Unterteilung der Netzwerk- und Transportschicht festgehalten wird. Sogar ein modernes Übertragungsprotokoll wie MPTCP, welches es ermöglicht mehrere Netzwerkpfade zu nutzen, kann die (oben genannten) Anforderungen oder Bedürfnisse des Inhaltes, nicht für die Pfadselektierung, in Betracht ziehen. In dieser Arbeit fordern wir die Trennung der Schichten heraus und zeigen, dass ein Informationsaustausch zwischen den Netzwerkschichten von großem Vorteil für das Konsumieren von Webseiten und Video Inhalten sein kann. Hierzu haben wir einen Ereignisorientierten Simulator entwickelt, mit dem wir untersuchten wie Applikationen eine informierte Entscheidung darüber treffen können, welche Netzwerkschnittstellen für verschiedene Inhalte, basierend auf vordefinierten Regeln, welche die Leistungsvorgaben oder Bedürfnisse eines Inhalts kodieren, benutzt werden sollen. Unsere Regeln erreichen eine Verbesserung um einen Faktor von Zwei in 20% unserer Testfälle, haben einen Vorteil in mehr als 50% der Fälle und erzeugen in keinem Fall einen Mehraufwand. Für Video Inhalte haben wir ein komplettes Video-Streaming System entwickelt, welches einen noch feingranulareren Informationsaustausch zwischen der Applikation und des Transportes ermöglicht. Unser, VOXEL genanntes, System ermöglicht es Applikationen dynamisch und auf Videobild Granularität zu bestimmen welche Videodaten, entsprechend der aktuellen Netzwerksituation, übertragen werden sollen. VOXEL kann das stehenbleiben von Videos im 90%-Perzentil drastisch, um bis zu 97%, reduzieren, ohne dabei die visuelle Qualität des übertragenen Videos zu beeinträchtigen. Wir haben unsere Leistungsverbesserung in einer Studie mit echten Benutzern bestätigt, bei der 84% der Befragten es, im vergleich zum aktuellen Stand der Technik, klar bevorzugten Videos zu schauen, die über VOXEL übertragen wurden