Efficient heuristics for energy-aware routing in networks with bundled links

Current networks are typically over-provisioned to ensure low delays, redundancy and reliability. These Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees are typically achieved using high end, high power network equipments. Their use, however, has led to concerns regarding green house gas emissions, which garnered a lot of attention recently and have resulted in a number of global initiatives aim at reducing the carbon footprint of Internet Service Providers (ISPs). These initiatives have motivated ISPs and researchers to design novel network algorithms and hardware that scale the usage or active time of a network according to traffic load. To this end, this paper considers the problem of shutting down a subset of bundled links during off-peak periods in order to minimize energy expenditure. Unfortunately, identifying the cables that minimize this objective is an NP-complete problem. Henceforth, we propose several practical heuristics based on Dijkstra’s algorithm and Yen’s k-shortest paths algorithm. We evaluated our heuristics on the Abilene network – with both real and synthetic traffic matrices and several larger random topologies with various loads. Our results show that the proposed heuristics to be effective and efficient. Moreover, our approaches could potentially reduce the energy usage of cables used in the Abilene network by up to 56.7%, assuming the traffic demands recorded on September 5, 2004

Traffic Control in Packet Switched Networks

This thesis examines traffic control options available in two existing routing solutions in packet-switched networks. The first solution is the shortest path hop-by-hop routing deployed with the OSPF or IS-IS routing protocol and the IP forwarding protocol. This is the initially deployed and still the most popular routing solution in the Internet. The second solution is explicit routing implemented with the RSVP-TE or CR-LDP signalling protocol and the MPLS forwarding protocol. This is the latest solution to have become widely deployed in the Internet. The thesis analyses the limitations of the two routing solutions as tools for traffic control and yields new insights that can guide the analysis and design of protocols involved in the process. A set of recommendations for modifications of the existing protocols is provided which would allow for a range of new traffic control approaches to be deployed in packet-switched networks. For future routing solutions which comply with the proposed recommendations two new algorithms are presented in the thesis. They are called the Link Mask Topology (LMT) algorithm, and the Link Cost Topology (LCT) algorithm. The two algorithms define a set of routing topologies and assign network traffic to routes available in these topologies aiming to simultaneously achieve high network throughput and fair resource allocation. While there are similarities in the operation of the two algorithms, their applicability is different as they allocate resources to multiple paths between two network nodes which are available in the defined routing topologies according to a different rule set. The LMT algorithm directs traffic sent between any pair of network nodes to a single route. The LCT algorithm directs traffic sent between a pair of network nodes to a number of routes. The performance of the two proposed algorithms is evaluated in the thesis with calculations comparing them to the shortest path routing algorithm in a number of test cases. The test results demonstrate the potentials of the two proposed algorithms in improving the performance of networks which employ shortest path routing

Internet Traffic Engineering : An Artificial Intelligence Approach

Dissertação de Mestrado em Ciência de Computadores, apresentada à Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade do Port

Approximately orchestrated routing and transportation analyzer: City-scale traffic simulation and control schemes

Along with other intelligent traffi c control schemes, autonomous vehicles present new opportunities for addressing traffi c congestion. Traffi c simulators enable researchers to explore these possibilities be- fore such vehicles are widespread. This thesis describes a new open source, agent-based simulator: the Approximately Orchestrated Routing and Transportation Analyzer, or AORTA. AORTA is designed to provide reasonably realistic simulation of any city in the world with zero con figuration, to run on cheap machines, and with an emphasis on easy use and simple code. Experiments described in this thesis can be set up on a new city in about five minutes. Two applications are built on AORTA by creating new intersection control policies and specifying new strategies for routing drivers. The first application, intersection auctions, allows humans to instruct their autonomous vehicle to bid on their behalf at intersections, granting them entry before other drivers who desire conflicting movements. The second, externality pricing, learns the travel time of a variety of di fferent routes and defi nes a localized notion of cost imposed on other drivers by following the route. This information is used to tax drivers who choose to improve their own trip by inconveniencing others. These two systems demonstrate AORTA's utility for simulating control of the traffi c of the near future.http://www.aorta-traffic.orgComputer Science

Self-* distributed query region covering in sensor networks

Wireless distributed sensor networks are used to monitor a multitude of environments for both civil and military applications. Sensors may be deployed to unreachable or inhospitable areas. Thus, they cannot be replaced easily. However, due to various factors, sensors\u27 internal memory, or the sensors themselves, can become corrupted. Hence, there is a need for more robust sensor networks. Sensors are most commonly densely deployed, but keeping all sensors continually active is not energy efficient. Our aim is to select the minimum number of sensors which can entirely cover a particular monitored area, while remaining strongly connected. This concept is called a Minimum Connected Cover of a query region in a sensor network. In this research, we have designed two fully distributed, robust, self-* solutions to the minimum connected cover of query regions that can cope with both transient faults and sensor crashes. We considered the most general case in which every sensor has a different sensing and communication radius. We have also designed extended versions of the algorithms that use multi-hop information to obtain better results utilizing small atomicity (i.e., each sensor reads only one of its neighbors\u27 variables at a time, instead of reading all neighbors\u27 variables). With this, we have proven self-* (self-configuration, self-stabilization, and self-healing) properties of our solutions, both analytically and experimentally. The simulation results show that our solutions provide better performance in terms of coverage than pre-existing self-stabilizing algorithms

Satellite Networks: Architectures, Applications, and Technologies

Since global satellite networks are moving to the forefront in enhancing the national and global information infrastructures due to communication satellites' unique networking characteristics, a workshop was organized to assess the progress made to date and chart the future. This workshop provided the forum to assess the current state-of-the-art, identify key issues, and highlight the emerging trends in the next-generation architectures, data protocol development, communication interoperability, and applications. Presentations on overview, state-of-the-art in research, development, deployment and applications and future trends on satellite networks are assembled

End-to-end security in active networks

Active network solutions have been proposed to many of the problems caused by the increasing heterogeneity of the Internet. These ystems allow nodes within the network to process data passing through in several ways. Allowing code from various sources to run on routers introduces numerous security concerns that have been addressed by research into safe languages, restricted execution environments, and other related areas. But little attention has been paid to an even more critical question: the effect on end-to-end security of active flow manipulation. This thesis first examines the threat model implicit in active networks. It develops a framework of security protocols in use at various layers of the networking stack, and their utility to multimedia transport and flow processing, and asks if it is reasonable to give active routers access to the plaintext of these flows. After considering the various security problem introduced, such as vulnerability to attacks on intermediaries or coercion, it concludes not. We then ask if active network systems can be built that maintain end-to-end security without seriously degrading the functionality they provide. We describe the design and analysis of three such protocols: a distributed packet filtering system that can be used to adjust multimedia bandwidth requirements and defend against denial-of-service attacks; an efficient composition of link and transport-layer reliability mechanisms that increases the performance of TCP over lossy wireless links; and a distributed watermarking servicethat can efficiently deliver media flows marked with the identity of their recipients. In all three cases, similar functionality is provided to designs that do not maintain end-to-end security. Finally, we reconsider traditional end-to-end arguments in both networking and security, and show that they have continuing importance for Internet design. Our watermarking work adds the concept of splitting trust throughout a network to that model; we suggest further applications of this idea

Experimenting with commodity 802.11 hardware: overview and future directions

The huge adoption of 802.11 technologies has triggered a vast amount of experimentally-driven research works. These works range from performance analysis to protocol enhancements, including the proposal of novel applications and services. Due to the affordability of the technology, this experimental research is typically based on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) devices, and, given the rate at which 802.11 releases new standards (which are adopted into new, affordable devices), the field is likely to continue to produce results. In this paper, we review and categorise the most prevalent works carried out with 802.11 COTS devices over the past 15 years, to present a timely snapshot of the areas that have attracted the most attention so far, through a taxonomy that distinguishes between performance studies, enhancements, services, and methodology. In this way, we provide a quick overview of the results achieved by the research community that enables prospective authors to identify potential areas of new research, some of which are discussed after the presentation of the survey.This work has been partly supported by the European Community through the CROWD project (FP7-ICT-318115) and by the Madrid Regional Government through the TIGRE5-CM program (S2013/ICE-2919).Publicad