Hierarchical Content Stores in High-speed ICN Routers: Emulation and Prototype Implementation

Recent work motivates the design of Information-centric rou-ters that make use of hierarchies of memory to jointly scale in the size and speed of content stores. The present paper advances this understanding by (i) instantiating a general purpose two-layer packet-level caching system, (ii) investigating the solution design space via emulation, and (iii) introducing a proof-of-concept prototype. The emulation-based study reveals insights about the broad design space, the expected impact of workload, and gains due to multi-threaded execution. The full-blown system prototype experimentally confirms that, by exploiting both DRAM and SSD memory technologies, ICN routers can sustain cache operations in excess of 10Gbps running on off-the-shelf hardware

Deux défis des Réseaux Logiciels : Relayage par le Nom et Vérification des Tables

The Internet changed the lives of network users: not only it affects users' habits, but it is also increasingly being shaped by network users' behavior.Several new services have been introduced during the past decades (i.e. file sharing, video streaming, cloud computing) to meet users' expectation.As a consequence, although the Internet infrastructure provides a good best-effort service to exchange information in a point-to-point fashion, this is not the principal need that todays users request. Current networks necessitate some major architectural changes in order to follow the upcoming requirements, but the experience of the past decades shows that bringing new features to the existing infrastructure may be slow.In this thesis work, we identify two main aspects of the Internet evolution: a “behavioral” aspect, which refers to a change occurred in the way users interact with the network, and a “structural” aspect, related to the evolution problem from an architectural point of view.The behavioral perspective states that there is a mismatch between the usage of the network and the actual functions it provides. While network devices implement the simple primitives of sending and receiving generic packets, users are really interested in different primitives, such as retrieving or consuming content. The structural perspective suggests that the problem of the slow evolution of the Internet infrastructure lies in its architectural design, that has been shown to be hardly upgradeable.On the one hand, to encounter the new network usage, the research community proposed the Named-data networking paradigm (NDN), which brings the content-based functionalities to network devices.On the other hand Software-defined networking (SDN) can be adopted to simplify the architectural evolution and shorten the upgrade-time thanks to its centralized software control plane, at the cost of a higher network complexity that can easily introduce some bugs. SDN verification is a novel research direction aiming to check the consistency and safety of network configurations by providing formal or empirical validation.The talk consists of two parts. In the first part, we focus on the behavioral aspect by presenting the design and evaluation of “Caesar”, a content router that advances the state-of-the-art by implementing content-based functionalities which may coexist with real network environments.In the second part, we target network misconfiguration diagnosis, and we present a framework for the analysis of the network topology and forwarding tables, which can be used to detect the presence of a loop at real-time and in real network environments.Cette thèse aborde des problèmes liés à deux aspects majeurs de l’évolution d’Internet : l’aspect >, qui correspond aux nouvelles interactions entre les utilisateurs et le réseau, et l’aspect >, lié aux changements d’Internet d’un point de vue architectural.Le manuscrit est composé d’un chapitre introductif qui donne les grandes lignes de recherche de ce travail de thèse, suivi d’un chapitre consacré à la description de l’état de l’art sur les deux aspects mentionnés ci-dessus. Parmi les solutions proposées par la communauté scientifique pour s'adapter à l’évolution d’Internet, deux nouveaux paradigmes réseaux sont particulièrement décrits : Information- Centric Networking (ICN) et Software-Defined Networking (SDN).La thèse continue avec la proposition de >, un dispositif réseau, inspiré par ICN, capable de gérer la distribution de contenus à partir de primitives de routage basées sur le nom des données et non les adresses des serveurs. Caesar est présenté dans deux chapitres, qui décrivent l’architecture et deux des principaux modules : le relayage et la gestion de la traçabilité des requêtes.La suite du manuscrit décrit un outil mathématique pour la détection efficace de boucles dans un réseau SDN d’un point de vue théorique. Les améliorations de l’algorithme proposé par rapport à l’état de l’art sont discutées.La thèse se conclue par un résumé des principaux résultats obtenus et une présentation des travaux en cours et futurs

Linux XIA: an interoperable meta network architecture

With the growing number of clean-slate redesigns of the Internet, the need for a medium that enables all stakeholders to participate in the realization, evaluation, and selection of these designs is increasing. We believe that the missing catalyst is a meta network architecture that welcomes most, if not all, clean-state designs on a level playing field, lowers deployment barriers, and leaves the final evaluation to the broader community. This thesis presents the eXpressive Internet (Meta) Architecture (XIA), itself a clean-slate design, as well as Linux XIA, a native implementation of XIA in the Linux kernel, as a candidate. As a meta network architecture, XIA is highly flexible, leaving stakeholders to choose an expressive set of network principals to instantiate a given network architecture within the XIA framework. Central to XIA is its novel, non-linear network addressing format, from which derive key architectural features such as evolvability, intrinsically secure identifiers, and a low degree of principal isolation. XIP, the network layer protocol of XIA, forwards packets by navigating these structured addresses and delegating the decision-making and packet processing to appropriate principals, accordingly. Taken together, these mechanisms work in tandem to support a broad spectrum of interoperable principals. We demonstrate how to port four distinct and unrelated network architectures onto Linux XIA, none of which were designed for interoperability with this platform. We then show that, notwithstanding this flexibility, Linux XIA's forwarding performance remains comparable to that of the more mature legacy TCP/IP stack implementation. Moreover, the ported architectures, namely IP, Serval, NDN, and ANTS, empower us to present a deployment plan for XIA, to explore design variations of the ported architectures that were impossible in their original form due to the requirement of self-sufficiency that a standalone network architecture bears, and to substantiate the claim that XIA readily supports and enables network evolution. Our work highlights the benefits of specializing network designs that XIA affords, and comprises instructive examples for the network researcher interested in design and implementation for future interoperability

On the design of efficient caching systems

Content distribution is currently the prevalent Internet use case, accounting for the majority of global Internet traffic and growing exponentially. There is general consensus that the most effective method to deal with the large amount of content demand is through the deployment of massively distributed caching infrastructures as the means to localise content delivery traffic. Solutions based on caching have been already widely deployed through Content Delivery Networks. Ubiquitous caching is also a fundamental aspect of the emerging Information-Centric Networking paradigm which aims to rethink the current Internet architecture for long term evolution. Distributed content caching systems are expected to grow substantially in the future, in terms of both footprint and traffic carried and, as such, will become substantially more complex and costly. This thesis addresses the problem of designing scalable and cost-effective distributed caching systems that will be able to efficiently support the expected massive growth of content traffic and makes three distinct contributions. First, it produces an extensive theoretical characterisation of sharding, which is a widely used technique to allocate data items to resources of a distributed system according to a hash function. Based on the findings unveiled by this analysis, two systems are designed contributing to the abovementioned objective. The first is a framework and related algorithms for enabling efficient load-balanced content caching. This solution provides qualitative advantages over previously proposed solutions, such as ease of modelling and availability of knobs to fine-tune performance, as well as quantitative advantages, such as 2x increase in cache hit ratio and 19-33% reduction in load imbalance while maintaining comparable latency to other approaches. The second is the design and implementation of a caching node enabling 20 Gbps speeds based on inexpensive commodity hardware. We believe these contributions advance significantly the state of the art in distributed caching systems

Parallel Simulation of Very Large-Scale General Cache Networks

In this paper we propose a methodology for the study of general cache networks, which is intrinsically scalable and amenable to parallel execution. We contrast two techniques: one that slices the network, and another that slices the content catalog. In the former, each core simulates requests for the whole catalog on a subgraph of the original topology, whereas in the latter each core simulates requests for a portion of the original catalog on a replica of the whole network. Interestingly, we find out that when the number of cores increases (and so the split ratio of the network topology), the overhead of message passing required to keeping consistency among nodes actually offsets any benefit from the parallelization: this is strictly due to the correlation among neighboring caches, meaning that requests arriving at one cache allocated on one core may depend on the status of one or more caches allocated on different cores. Even more interestingly, we find out that the newly proposed catalog slicing, on the contrary, achieves an ideal speedup in the number of cores. Overall, our system, which we make available as open source software, enables performance assessment of large scale general cache networks, i.e., comprising hundreds of nodes, trillions contents, and complex routing and caching algorithms, in minutes of CPU time and with exiguous amounts of memory

Linux XIA: an interoperable meta network architecture to crowdsource the future Internet

With the growing number of proposed clean-slate redesigns of the Internet, the need for a medium that enables all stakeholders to participate in the realization, evaluation, and selection of these designs is increasing. We believe that the missing catalyst is a meta network architecture that welcomes most, if not all, clean-state designs on a level playing field, lowers deployment barriers, and leaves the final evaluation to the broader community. This paper presents Linux XIA, a native implementation of XIA [12] in the Linux kernel, as a candidate. We first describe Linux XIA in terms of its architectural realizations and algorithmic contributions. We then demonstrate how to port several distinct and unrelated network architectures onto Linux XIA. Finally, we provide a hybrid evaluation of Linux XIA at three levels of abstraction in terms of its ability to: evolve and foster interoperation of new architectures, embed disparate architectures inside the implementation’s framework, and maintain a comparable forwarding performance to that of the legacy TCP/IP implementation. Given this evaluation, we substantiate a previously unsupported claim of XIA: that it readily supports and enables network evolution, collaboration, and interoperability—traits we view as central to the success of any future Internet architecture.This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under awards CNS-1040800, CNS-1345307 and CNS-1347525

Content, Topology and Cooperation in In-network Caching

In-network caching aims at improving content delivery and alleviating pressures on network bandwidth by leveraging universally networked caches. This thesis studies the design of cooperative in-network caching strategy from three perspectives: content, topology and cooperation, specifically focuses on the mechanisms of content delivery and cooperation policy and their impacts on the performance of cache networks. The main contributions of this thesis are twofold. From measurement perspective, we show that the conventional metric hit rate is not sufficient in evaluating a caching strategy on non-trivial topologies, therefore we introduce footprint reduction and coupling factor, which contain richer information. We show cooperation policy is the key in balancing various tradeoffs in caching strategy design, and further investigate the performance impact from content per se via different chunking schemes. From design perspective, we first show different caching heuristics and smart routing schemes can significantly improve the caching performance and facilitate content delivery. We then incorporate well-defined fairness metric into design and derive the unique optimal caching solution on the Pareto boundary with bargaining game framework. In addition, our study on the functional relationship between cooperation overhead and neighborhood size indicates collaboration should be constrained in a small neighborhood due to its cost growing exponentially on general network topologies.Verkonsisäinen välimuistitallennus pyrkii parantamaan sisällöntoimitusta ja helpottamaan painetta verkon siirtonopeudessa hyödyntämällä universaaleja verkottuneita välimuisteja. Tämä väitöskirja tutkii yhteistoiminnallisen verkonsisäisen välimuistitallennuksen suunnittelua kolmesta näkökulmasta: sisällön, topologian ja yhteistyön kautta, erityisesti keskittyen sisällöntoimituksen mekanismeihin ja yhteistyökäytäntöihin sekä näiden vaikutuksiin välimuistiverkkojen performanssiin. Väitöskirjan suurimmat aikaansaannokset ovat kahdella saralla. Mittaamisen näkökulmasta näytämme, että perinteinen metrinen välimuistin osumatarkkuus ei ole riittävä ei-triviaalin välimuistitallennusstrategian arvioinnissa, joten esittelemme parempaa informaatiota sisältävät jalanjäljen pienentämisen sekä yhdistämistekijän. Näytämme, että yhteistyökäytäntö on avain erilaisten välimuistitallennusstrategian suunnitteluun liittyvien kompromissien tasapainotukseen ja tutkimme lisää sisällön erilaisten lohkomisjärjestelmien kautta aiheuttamaa vaikutusta performanssiin. Suunnittelun näkökulmasta näytämme ensin, kuinka erilaiset välimuistitallennuksen heuristiikat ja viisaan reitityksen järjestelmät parantavat merkittävästi välimuistitallennusperformanssia sekä helpottavat sisällön toimitusta. Sisällytämme sitten suunnitteluun hyvin määritellyn oikeudenmukaisuusmittarin ja johdamme uniikin optimaalin välimuistitallennusratkaisun Pareto-rintamalla neuvottelupelin kehyksissä. Lisäksi tutkimuksemme yhteistyökustannusten ja naapurustokoon funktionaalisesta suhteesta viittaa siihen, että yhteistyö on syytä rajoittaa pieneen naapurustoon sen kustannusten kasvaessa eksponentiaalisesti yleisessä verkkotopologiassa

Will SDN be part of 5G?

For many, this is no longer a valid question and the case is considered settled with SDN/NFV (Software Defined Networking/Network Function Virtualization) providing the inevitable innovation enablers solving many outstanding management issues regarding 5G. However, given the monumental task of softwarization of radio access network (RAN) while 5G is just around the corner and some companies have started unveiling their 5G equipment already, the concern is very realistic that we may only see some point solutions involving SDN technology instead of a fully SDN-enabled RAN. This survey paper identifies all important obstacles in the way and looks at the state of the art of the relevant solutions. This survey is different from the previous surveys on SDN-based RAN as it focuses on the salient problems and discusses solutions proposed within and outside SDN literature. Our main focus is on fronthaul, backward compatibility, supposedly disruptive nature of SDN deployment, business cases and monetization of SDN related upgrades, latency of general purpose processors (GPP), and additional security vulnerabilities, softwarization brings along to the RAN. We have also provided a summary of the architectural developments in SDN-based RAN landscape as not all work can be covered under the focused issues. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on the state of the art of SDN-based RAN and clearly points out the gaps in the technology.Comment: 33 pages, 10 figure