eBPF-based Content and Computation-aware Communication for Real-time Edge Computing

By placing computation resources within a one-hop wireless topology, the recent edge computing paradigm is a key enabler of real-time Internet of Things (IoT) applications. In the context of IoT scenarios where the same information from a sensor is used by multiple applications at different locations, the data stream needs to be replicated. However, the transportation of parallel streams might not be feasible due to limitations in the capacity of the network transporting the data. To address this issue, a content and computation-aware communication control framework is proposed based on the Software Defined Network (SDN) paradigm. The framework supports multi-streaming using the extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF), where the traffic flow and packet replication for each specific computation process is controlled by a program running inside an in-kernel Virtual Ma- chine (VM). The proposed framework is instantiated to address a case-study scenario where video streams from multiple cameras are transmitted to the edge processor for real-time analysis. Numerical results demonstrate the advantage of the proposed framework in terms of programmability, network bandwidth and system resource savings.Comment: This article has been accepted for publication in the IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM Workshops), 201

Prompt Application-Transparent Transaction Revalidation in Software Transactional Memory

Software Transactional Memory (STM) allows encapsulating shared-data accesses within transactions, executed with atomicity and isolation guarantees. The assessment of the consistency of a running transaction is performed by the STM layer at specific points of its execution, such as when a read or write access to a shared object occurs, or upon a commit attempt. However, performance and energy efficiency issues may arise when no shared-data read/write operation occurs for a while along a thread running a transaction. In this scenario, the STM layer may not regain control for a considerable amount of time, thus not being able to early detect if such transaction has become inconsistent in the meantime. To tackle this problem we present an STM architecture that, thanks to a lightweight operating system support, is able to perform a fine-grain periodic (hence prompt) revalidation of running transactions. Our proposal targets Linux and x86 systems and has been integrated with the open source TinySTM package. Experimental results with a port of the TPC-C benchmark to STM environments show the effectiveness of our solution

Network layer access control for context-aware IPv6 applications

As part of the Lancaster GUIDE II project, we have developed a novel wireless access point protocol designed to support the development of next generation mobile context-aware applications in our local environs. Once deployed, this architecture will allow ordinary citizens secure, accountable and convenient access to a set of tailored applications including location, multimedia and context based services, and the public Internet. Our architecture utilises packet marking and network level packet filtering techniques within a modified Mobile IPv6 protocol stack to perform access control over a range of wireless network technologies. In this paper, we describe the rationale for, and components of, our architecture and contrast our approach with other state-of-the- art systems. The paper also contains details of our current implementation work, including preliminary performance measurements

FAIR: Forwarding Accountability for Internet Reputability

This paper presents FAIR, a forwarding accountability mechanism that incentivizes ISPs to apply stricter security policies to their customers. The Autonomous System (AS) of the receiver specifies a traffic profile that the sender AS must adhere to. Transit ASes on the path mark packets. In case of traffic profile violations, the marked packets are used as a proof of misbehavior. FAIR introduces low bandwidth overhead and requires no per-packet and no per-flow state for forwarding. We describe integration with IP and demonstrate a software switch running on commodity hardware that can switch packets at a line rate of 120 Gbps, and can forward 140M minimum-sized packets per second, limited by the hardware I/O subsystem. Moreover, this paper proposes a "suspicious bit" for packet headers - an application that builds on top of FAIR's proofs of misbehavior and flags packets to warn other entities in the network.Comment: 16 pages, 12 figure