Adaptive and reliable multipath provisioning for media transfer in SDN-based overlay networks

Traditional routing in the Internet is best-effort which makes it challenging for video streaming since no throughput, jitter, delay or loss rate is guaranteed. As different paths have different characteristics, path differentiation such as multipath routing is a promising technique to be used for meeting QoS requirements of media-intensive applications. Using overlay networks different paths are offered which enable more flexibility in QoS and congestion control while the reliability of the connections is enhanced. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is known to be a promising solution to the problems of routing as it provides fine-grained control over packet handling. Relying on SDN, we propose an adaptive multipath provisioning scheme ensuring maximal bandwidth and resiliency of media transfer in overlay networks. The scheme is a time slot-based approach which dynamically finds multipaths. It relies on both active probing and traffic prediction. The experimental results confirm that a more accurate prediction together with more frequent probing lead to fewer number of path re-calculation and also indicate that the proposed scheme enhances the reliability of connections while a more balanced load is achieved in the network compared to the shortest path-based scheme. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Exploiting the power of multiplicity: a holistic survey of network-layer multipath

The Internet is inherently a multipath network: For an underlying network with only a single path, connecting various nodes would have been debilitatingly fragile. Unfortunately, traditional Internet technologies have been designed around the restrictive assumption of a single working path between a source and a destination. The lack of native multipath support constrains network performance even as the underlying network is richly connected and has redundant multiple paths. Computer networks can exploit the power of multiplicity, through which a diverse collection of paths is resource pooled as a single resource, to unlock the inherent redundancy of the Internet. This opens up a new vista of opportunities, promising increased throughput (through concurrent usage of multiple paths) and increased reliability and fault tolerance (through the use of multiple paths in backup/redundant arrangements). There are many emerging trends in networking that signify that the Internet's future will be multipath, including the use of multipath technology in data center computing; the ready availability of multiple heterogeneous radio interfaces in wireless (such as Wi-Fi and cellular) in wireless devices; ubiquity of mobile devices that are multihomed with heterogeneous access networks; and the development and standardization of multipath transport protocols such as multipath TCP. The aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive survey of the literature on network-layer multipath solutions. We will present a detailed investigation of two important design issues, namely, the control plane problem of how to compute and select the routes and the data plane problem of how to split the flow on the computed paths. The main contribution of this paper is a systematic articulation of the main design issues in network-layer multipath routing along with a broad-ranging survey of the vast literature on network-layer multipathing. We also highlight open issues and identify directions for future work

WiBACK: A back-haul network architecture for 5G networks

Recently both academic and industry worlds has started to define the successor of Long Term Evolution (LTE), so-called 5G networks, which will most likely appear by the end of the decade. It is widely accepted that those 5G networks will have to deal with significantly more challenging requirements in terms of provided bandwidth, latency and supported services. This will lead to not only modifications in access and parts of core networks, but will trigger changes throughout the whole network, including the Back-haul segment. In this work we present our vision of a 5G Back-haul network and identify the associated challenges. We then describe our Wireless Backhaul (WiBACK) architecture, which implements Software Defined Network (SDN) concepts and further extends them into the wireless domain. Finally we present a brief overview of our pilot installations before we conclude.This work has been supported by the BATS research project which is funded by the European Union Seventh Framework Programme under contract n317533

A Cognitive Routing framework for Self-Organised Knowledge Defined Networks

This study investigates the applicability of machine learning methods to the routing protocols for achieving rapid convergence in self-organized knowledge-defined networks. The research explores the constituents of the Self-Organized Networking (SON) paradigm for 5G and beyond, aiming to design a routing protocol that complies with the SON requirements. Further, it also exploits a contemporary discipline called Knowledge-Defined Networking (KDN) to extend the routing capability by calculating the “Most Reliable” path than the shortest one. The research identifies the potential key areas and possible techniques to meet the objectives by surveying the state-of-the-art of the relevant fields, such as QoS aware routing, Hybrid SDN architectures, intelligent routing models, and service migration techniques. The design phase focuses primarily on the mathematical modelling of the routing problem and approaches the solution by optimizing at the structural level. The work contributes Stochastic Temporal Edge Normalization (STEN) technique which fuses link and node utilization for cost calculation; MRoute, a hybrid routing algorithm for SDN that leverages STEN to provide constant-time convergence; Most Reliable Route First (MRRF) that uses a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) to approximate route-reliability as the metric of MRRF. Additionally, the research outcomes include a cross-platform SDN Integration framework (SDN-SIM) and a secure migration technique for containerized services in a Multi-access Edge Computing environment using Distributed Ledger Technology. The research work now eyes the development of 6G standards and its compliance with Industry-5.0 for enhancing the abilities of the present outcomes in the light of Deep Reinforcement Learning and Quantum Computing