Adaptive Random Sampling for Traffic Volume Measurement

Traffic measurement and monitoring are an important component of network management and traffic engineering. With high-speed Internet backbone links, efficient and effective packet sampling techniques for traffic measurement and monitoring are not only desirable, but also increasingly becoming a necessity. Since the utility of sampling depends on the accuracy and economy of measurement, it is important to control sampling error. In this paper, we propose an adaptive packet sampling technique for flow-level traffic measurement with stratification approach. We employ and advance sampling theory in order to ensure the accurate estimation of large flows. With real network traces, we demonstrate that the proposed sampling technique provides unbiased estimation of flow size with controllable error bound, in terms of both packet and byte counts for elephant flows, while avoiding excessive oversampling

Conserve and Protect Resources in Software-Defined Networking via the Traffic Engineering Approach

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is revolutionizing the architecture and operation of computer networks and promises a more agile and cost-efficient network management. SDN centralizes the network control logic and separates the control plane from the data plane, thus enabling flexible management of networks. A network based on SDN consists of a data plane and a control plane. To assist management of devices and data flows, a network also has an independent monitoring plane. These coexisting network planes have various types of resources, such as bandwidth utilized to transmit monitoring data, energy spent to power data forwarding devices and computational resources to control a network. Unwise management, even abusive utilization of these resources lead to the degradation of the network performance and increase the Operating Expenditure (Opex) of the network owner. Conserving and protecting limited network resources is thus among the key requirements for efficient networking. However, the heterogeneity of the network hardware and network traffic workloads expands the configuration space of SDN, making it a challenging task to operate a network efficiently. Furthermore, the existing approaches usually lack the capability to automatically adapt network configurations to handle network dynamics and diverse optimization requirements. Addtionally, a centralized SDN controller has to run in a protected environment against certain attacks. This thesis builds upon the centralized management capability of SDN, and uses cross-layer network optimizations to perform joint traffic engineering, e.g., routing, hardware and software configurations. The overall goal is to overcome the management complexities in conserving and protecting resources in multiple functional planes in SDN when facing network heterogeneities and system dynamics. This thesis presents four contributions: (1) resource-efficient network monitoring, (2) resource-efficient data forwarding, (3) using self-adaptive algorithms to improve network resource efficiency, and (4) mitigating abusive usage of resources for network controlling. The first contribution of this thesis is a resource-efficient network monitoring solution. In this thesis, we consider one specific type of virtual network management function: flow packet inspection. This type of the network monitoring application requires to duplicate packets of target flows and send them to packet monitors for in-depth analysis. To avoid the competition for resources between the original data and duplicated data, the network operators can transmit the data flows through physically (e.g., different communication mediums) or virtually (e.g., distinguished network slices) separated channels having different resource consumption properties. We propose the REMO solution, namely Resource Efficient distributed Monitoring, to reduce the overall network resource consumption incurred by both types of data, via jointly considering the locations of the packet monitors, the selection of devices forking the data packets, and flow path scheduling strategies. In the second contribution of this thesis, we investigate the resource efficiency problem in hybrid, server-centric data center networks equipped with both traditional wired connections (e.g., InfiniBand or Ethernet) and advanced high-data-rate wireless links (e.g., directional 60GHz wireless technology). The configuration space of hybrid SDN equipped with both wired and wireless communication technologies is massively large due to the complexity brought by the device heterogeneity. To tackle this problem, we present the ECAS framework to reduce the power consumption and maintain the network performance. The approaches based on the optimization models and heuristic algorithms are considered as the traditional way to reduce the operation and facility resource consumption in SDN. These approaches are either difficult to directly solve or specific for a particular problem space. As the third contribution of this thesis, we investigates the approach of using Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to improve the adaptivity of the management modules for network resource and data flow scheduling. The goal of the DRL agent in the SDN network is to reduce the power consumption of SDN networks without severely degrading the network performance. The fourth contribution of this thesis is a protection mechanism based upon flow rate limiting to mitigate abusive usage of the SDN control plane resource. Due to the centralized architecture of SDN and its handling mechanism for new data flows, the network controller can be the failure point due to the crafted cyber-attacks, especially the Control-Plane- Saturation (CPS) attack. We proposes an In-Network Flow mAnagement Scheme (INFAS) to effectively reduce the generation of malicious control packets depending on the parameters configured for the proposed mitigation algorithm. In summary, the contributions of this thesis address various unique challenges to construct resource-efficient and secure SDN. This is achieved by designing and implementing novel and intelligent models and algorithms to configure networks and perform network traffic engineering, in the protected centralized network controller

A training monitoring system for cyclist based on wireless sensor networks

This paper presents a training monitoring system for cyclist that is based on the technology of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). A stable and reliable wireless cyclist monitoring system is vital to establish a smart and efficient sports management program. A training monitoring system has been developed and tested in a real cyclist training environment in a velodrome. The system is designed is such a way that the packet loss rate is minimum. Using TelG mote as the basis, customized sensor nodes that function as a forwarder node and the relay nodes are developed to form the WSN. This WSN is linked to the cloud network on the Internet. The cloud network is then established and end users application for data accessing is designed. Several experiments have been conducted in a real scenario in a velodrome to measure the reliability of the system architecture. It is shown from the experiments that the proposed system is reliable even when the cyclist is moving at a high speed. The packet loss is less than 2% which does not give a huge impact to the data transmission

Cross-Layer Platform for Dynamic, Energy-Efficient Optical Networks

The design of the next-generation Internet infrastructure is driven by the need to sustain the massive growth in bandwidth demands. Novel, energy-efficient, optical networking technologies and architectures are required to effectively meet the stringent performance requirements with low cost and ultrahigh energy efficiencies. In this thesis, a cross-layer communications platform is proposed to enable greater intelligence and functionality on the physical layer. Providing the optical layer with advanced networking capabilities will facilitate the dynamic management and optimization of optical switching based on performance monitoring measurements and higher-layer attributes. The cross-layer platform aims to create a new framework for networks to incorporate packet-scale measurement subsystems and techniques for monitoring the health of the optical channel. This will allow for quality-of-service- and energy-aware routing schemes, as well as an enhanced awareness of the optical data signals. This thesis first presents the design and development of an optical packet switching fabric. Leveraging a networking test-bed environment to validate networking hypotheses, advanced switching functionalities are demonstrated, including the support for quality-of-service based routing and packet multicasting. The investigated cross-layering is based on emerging optical technologies, enabling packet protection techniques and packet-rate switching fabric reconfiguration. Coupled with fast performance monitoring, the platform will achieve significant performance gains within the endeavor of all-optical switching. Allowing for a more intelligent, programmable optical layer aims to support greater flexibility with respect to bandwidth allocation and potentially a significant reduction in the network's energy consumption. The ultimate deliverable of this work is a high-performance, cross-layer enabled optical network node. The experimental demonstration of an initial prototype creates a dynamic network element with distributed control plane management, featuring fast packet-rate optical switching capabilities and embedded physical-layer performance monitoring modules. The cross-layer box enables an intelligent traffic delivery system that can dynamically manipulate optical switching on a packet-granular scale. With the goal of achieving advanced multi-layer routing and control algorithms, the network node requires an intelligent co-optimization across all the layers. The proposed cross-layer design should drive optical technologies and architectures in an innovative way, in order to fulfill the void between the design of basic photonic devices and the networking protocols that use them. The performance of the entire network -- from the optical components, to the routing algorithms and user applications -- should be optimized in concert. This contribution to the area of cross-layer network design creates an adaptable optical pipe that is extremely flexible and intelligent aware of both the physical optical signals and higher-layer requirements. The impact of this work will be seen in the realization of dynamic, energy-efficient optical communication links in future networking infrastructures

Alternate marking-based network telemetry for industrial WSNs

For continuous, persistent and problem-free operation of Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSN), it is critical to have visibility and awareness into what is happening on the network at any one time. Especially, for the use cases with strong needs for deterministic and real-time network services with latency and reliability guarantees, it is vital to monitor network devices continuously to guarantee their functioning, detect and isolate relevant problems and verify if all system requirements are being met simultaneously. In this context, this article investigates a light-weight telemetry solution for IWSNs, which enables the collection of accurate and continuous flowbased telemetry information, while adding no overhead on the monitored packets. The proposed monitoring solution adopts the recent Alternate Marking Performance Monitoring (AMPM) concept and mainly targets measuring end-to-end and hopby-hop reliability and delay performance in critical application flows. Besides, the technical capabilities and characteristics of the proposed solution are evaluated via a real-life implementation and practical experiments, validating its suitability for IWSNs

PluralisMAC: a generic multi-MAC framework for heterogeneous, multiservice wireless networks, applied to smart containers

Developing energy-efficient MAC protocols for lightweight wireless systems has been a challenging task for decades because of the specific requirements of various applications and the varying environments in which wireless systems are deployed. Many MAC protocols for wireless networks have been proposed, often custom-made for a specific application. It is clear that one MAC does not fit all the requirements. So, how should a MAC layer deal with an application that has several modes (each with different requirements) or with the deployment of another application during the lifetime of the system? Especially in a mobile wireless system, like Smart Monitoring of Containers, we cannot know in advance the application state (empty container versus stuffed container). Dynamic switching between different energy-efficient MAC strategies is needed. Our architecture, called PluralisMAC, contains a generic multi-MAC framework and a generic neighbour monitoring and filtering framework. To validate the real-world feasibility of our architecture, we have implemented it in TinyOS and have done experiments on the TMote Sky nodes in the w-iLab.t testbed. Experimental results show that dynamic switching between MAC strategies is possible with minimal receive chain overhead, while meeting the various application requirements (reliability and low-energy consumption)

A Novel Framework for Software Defined Wireless Body Area Network

Software Defined Networking (SDN) has gained huge popularity in replacing traditional network by offering flexible and dynamic network management. It has drawn significant attention of the researchers from both academia and industries. Particularly, incorporating SDN in Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) applications indicates promising benefits in terms of dealing with challenges like traffic management, authentication, energy efficiency etc. while enhancing administrative control. This paper presents a novel framework for Software Defined WBAN (SDWBAN), which brings the concept of SDN technology into WBAN applications. By decoupling the control plane from data plane and having more programmatic control would assist to overcome the current lacking and challenges of WBAN. Therefore, we provide a conceptual framework for SDWBAN with packet flow model and a future direction of research pertaining to SDWBAN.Comment: Presented on 8th International Conference on Intelligent Systems, Modelling and Simulatio