Assessing the quality of flow measurements from OpenFlow devices

Since its initial proposal in 2008, OpenFlow has evolved to become today’s main enabler of Software-Defined Networking. OpenFlow specifies operations for network forwarding devices and a communication protocol between data and control planes. Although not primarily designed as a traffic measurement tool, many works have proposed to use measured data from OpenFlow to support, e.g., traffic engineering or security in OpenFlow-enabled networks. These works, however, generally do not question or address the quality of actual measured data obtained from OpenFlow devices. Therefore, in this paper we assess the quality of measurements in real OpenFlow devices from multiple vendors. We demonstrate that inconsistencies and measurement artifacts can be found due to particularities of different OpenFlow implementations, making it impractical to deploy an OpenFlow measurement-based approach in a network consisting of devices from multiple vendors. In addition, we show that the accuracy of measured packet and byte counts and duration for flows vary among the tested devices, and in some cases counters are not even implemented for the sake of forwarding performance

Software-defined networking: guidelines for experimentation and validation in large-scale real world scenarios

Part 1: IIVC WorkshopInternational audienceThis article thoroughly details large-scale real world experiments using Software-Defined Networking in the testbed setup. More precisely, it provides a description of the foundation technology behind these experiments, which in turn is focused around OpenFlow and on the OFELIA testbed. In this testbed preliminary experiments were performed in order to tune up settings and procedures, analysing the encountered problems and their respective solutions. A methodology consisting of five large-scale experiments is proposed in order to properly validate and improve the evaluation techniques used in OpenFlow scenarios

iTeleScope: Intelligent Video Telemetry and Classification in Real-Time using Software Defined Networking

Video continues to dominate network traffic, yet operators today have poor visibility into the number, duration, and resolutions of the video streams traversing their domain. Current approaches are inaccurate, expensive, or unscalable, as they rely on statistical sampling, middle-box hardware, or packet inspection software. We present {\em iTelescope}, the first intelligent, inexpensive, and scalable SDN-based solution for identifying and classifying video flows in real-time. Our solution is novel in combining dynamic flow rules with telemetry and machine learning, and is built on commodity OpenFlow switches and open-source software. We develop a fully functional system, train it in the lab using multiple machine learning algorithms, and validate its performance to show over 95\% accuracy in identifying and classifying video streams from many providers including Youtube and Netflix. Lastly, we conduct tests to demonstrate its scalability to tens of thousands of concurrent streams, and deploy it live on a campus network serving several hundred real users. Our system gives unprecedented fine-grained real-time visibility of video streaming performance to operators of enterprise and carrier networks at very low cost.Comment: 12 pages, 16 figure

Segment Routing: a Comprehensive Survey of Research Activities, Standardization Efforts and Implementation Results

Fixed and mobile telecom operators, enterprise network operators and cloud providers strive to face the challenging demands coming from the evolution of IP networks (e.g. huge bandwidth requirements, integration of billions of devices and millions of services in the cloud). Proposed in the early 2010s, Segment Routing (SR) architecture helps face these challenging demands, and it is currently being adopted and deployed. SR architecture is based on the concept of source routing and has interesting scalability properties, as it dramatically reduces the amount of state information to be configured in the core nodes to support complex services. SR architecture was first implemented with the MPLS dataplane and then, quite recently, with the IPv6 dataplane (SRv6). IPv6 SR architecture (SRv6) has been extended from the simple steering of packets across nodes to a general network programming approach, making it very suitable for use cases such as Service Function Chaining and Network Function Virtualization. In this paper we present a tutorial and a comprehensive survey on SR technology, analyzing standardization efforts, patents, research activities and implementation results. We start with an introduction on the motivations for Segment Routing and an overview of its evolution and standardization. Then, we provide a tutorial on Segment Routing technology, with a focus on the novel SRv6 solution. We discuss the standardization efforts and the patents providing details on the most important documents and mentioning other ongoing activities. We then thoroughly analyze research activities according to a taxonomy. We have identified 8 main categories during our analysis of the current state of play: Monitoring, Traffic Engineering, Failure Recovery, Centrally Controlled Architectures, Path Encoding, Network Programming, Performance Evaluation and Miscellaneous...Comment: SUBMITTED TO IEEE COMMUNICATIONS SURVEYS & TUTORIAL

Implementación de un sistema SDN para la movilidad en redes OMNIRAN

This document details all the information needed to understand and test distributed mobility management using the SDN paradigm. This project stars by an analysis of the mobility problem in dense networks. Traditionally mobility has been managed with hierarchical approaches extending the current mobility protocols. But thinking in the future evolution of the network into dense environments some scalability problems appear. The traditional centralized elements may not be able to handle all the traffic in the network and bottlenecks appear at the Mobility Anchors. Nowadays, the problems related to scalability are mostly resolved with hardware upgrades, but in dense environments this couldn’t be enough and surely it would be quite expensive. To find a solution to this problem the IETF has chartered the Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) Group.This project focus on implementing a DMM-based mobility solution designed within the EU FP7 CROWD project. Once the analysis of the problem ended and the requirements of the theoretical solution were defined, we developed all the necessary elements to physically build a distributed network using SDN to manage layer 2 and layer 3.The entities of the network are defined by the CROWD projectin its related publications[9][10]. These districts were run using an SDN implementation called OpenFlow. With all the elements developed we proceed to perform the necessary tests in order to evaluate the distributed mobility management as a solution. This document explains the full design, execution and validationprocesses. Finally all the measurements and statistical data are detailed in order to have an approximation of the services that could achieve the developed network.Ingeniería Telemátic

Networking Solutions for Integrated Heterogeneous Wireless Ecosystem

As wireless communications technology is steadily evolving to improve the offered connectivity levels, additional research on emerging network architectures is becoming timely to understand the applicability of both traditional and novel networking solutions. This chapter concentrates on the utilization of cloud computing techniques to construct feasible system prototypes and demonstrators within the rapidly maturing heterogeneous wireless ecosystem. Our first solution facilitates cooperative radio resource management in heterogeneous networks. The second solution enables assisted direct connectivity between proximate users. The contents of the chapter outline our corresponding research and development efforts as well as summarize the major experiences and lessons learned