Using Tuangou to reduce IP transit costs

A majority of ISPs (Internet Service Providers) support connectivity to the entire Internet by transiting their traffic via other providers. Although the transit prices per Mbps decline steadily, the overall transit costs of these ISPs remain high or even increase, due to the traffic growth. The discontent of the ISPs with the high transit costs has yielded notable innovations such as peering, content distribution networks, multicast, and peer-to-peer localization. While the above solutions tackle the problem by reducing the transit traffic, this paper explores a novel approach that reduces the transit costs without altering the traffic. In the proposed CIPT (Cooperative IP Transit), multiple ISPs cooperate to jointly purchase IP (Internet Protocol) transit in bulk. The aggregate transit costs decrease due to the economies-of-scale effect of typical subadditive pricing as well as burstable billing: not all ISPs transit their peak traffic during the same period. To distribute the aggregate savings among the CIPT partners, we propose Shapley-value sharing of the CIPT transit costs. Using public data about IP traffic of 264 ISPs and transit prices, we quantitatively evaluate CIPT and show that significant savings can be achieved, both in relative and absolute terms. We also discuss the organizational embodiment, relationship with transit providers, traffic confidentiality, and other aspects of CIPT

Quality of Service improvements for real time multimedia applications using next generation network architectures and blockchain in Internet Service Provider cooperative scenario

Real time communications are becoming part of our daily life, requiring constrained requisites with the purpose of being enjoyed in harmony by end users. The factors ruling these requisites are Quality of Service parameters of the users' Internet connections. Achieving a satisfactory QoS level for real time communications depends on parameters that are strongly influenced by the quality of the network connections among the Internet Service Providers, which are located in the path between final users and Over The Top service providers that are supplying them with real time services. Final users can be: business people having real time videoconferences, or adopting crytpocurrencies in their exchanges, videogamers playing online games together with others residing in other countries, migrants talking with their relatives or watching their children growing up in their home countries, people with disabilities adopting tecnologies to help them, doctors performing remote surgeries, manufacturers adopting augmented reality devices to perform dangerous tasks. Each of them performing their daily activities are requiring specific QoS parameters to their ISPs, that nowadays seem to be unable to provide them with a satisfactory QoS level for these kinds of real time services. Through the adoption of next generation networks, such as the Information Centric Networking, it would be possible to overcome the QoS problems that nowadays are experienced. By adopting Blockchain technologies, in several use cases, it would be possible to improve those security aspects related to the non-temperability of information and privacy. I started this thesis analyzing next generation architectures enabling real time multimedia communications. In Software Defined Networking, Named Data Networking and Community Information Centric Networking, I highlighted potential approaches to solve QoS problems that are affecting real time multimedia applications. During my experiments I found that applications able to transmit high quality videos, such as 4k or 8k videos, or to directly interact with devices AR/VR enabled are missing for both ICN approaches. Then I proposed a REST interface for the enforcing of a specific QoS parameter, the round trip time (RTT) taking into consideration the specific use case of a game company that connects with the same telecommunication company of the final user. Supposing that the proposed REST APIs have been deployed in the game company and in the ISP, when one or more users are experiencing lag, the game company will try to ask the ISP to reduce the RTT for that specific user or that group of users. This request can be done by performing a call to a method where IP address(es) and the maximum RTT desired are passed. I also proposed other methods, through which it would be possible to retrieve information about the QoS parameters, and exchange, if necessary, an exceeding parameter in change of another one. The proposed REST APIs can also be used in more complex scenarios, where ISPs along the path are chained together, in order to improve the end to end QoS among Over The Top service provider and final users. To store the information exchanged by using the proposed REST APIs, I proposed to adopt a permissioned blockchain, analizying the ISPs cooperative use case with Hyperledger Fabric, where I proposed the adoption of the Proof of Authority consensus algorithm, to increase the throughput in terms of transactions per second. In a specific case that I examined, I am proposing a combination of Information Centric Networking and Blockchain, in an architecture where ISPs are exchanging valuable information regarding final Users, to improve their QoS parameters. I also proposed my smart contract for the gaming delay use case, that can be used to rule the communication among those ISPs that are along the path among OTT and final users. An extension of this work can be done, by defining billing costs for the QoS improvements

Progressive introduction of network softwarization in operational telecom networks: advances at architectural, service and transport levels

Technological paradigms such as Software Defined Networking, Network Function Virtualization and Network Slicing are altogether offering new ways of providing services. This process is widely known as Network Softwarization, where traditional operational networks adopt capabilities and mechanisms inherit form the computing world, such as programmability, virtualization and multi-tenancy. This adoption brings a number of challenges, both from the technological and operational perspectives. On the other hand, they provide an unprecedented flexibility opening opportunities to developing new services and new ways of exploiting and consuming telecom networks. This Thesis first overviews the implications of the progressive introduction of network softwarization in operational networks for later on detail some advances at different levels, namely architectural, service and transport levels. It is done through specific exemplary use cases and evolution scenarios, with the goal of illustrating both new possibilities and existing gaps for the ongoing transition towards an advanced future mode of operation. This is performed from the perspective of a telecom operator, paying special attention on how to integrate all these paradigms into operational networks for assisting on their evolution targeting new, more sophisticated service demands.Programa de Doctorado en Ingeniería Telemática por la Universidad Carlos III de MadridPresidente: Eduardo Juan Jacob Taquet.- Secretario: Francisco Valera Pintor.- Vocal: Jorge López Vizcaín

SDN/NFV-enabled satellite communications networks: opportunities, scenarios and challenges

In the context of next generation 5G networks, the satellite industry is clearly committed to revisit and revamp the role of satellite communications. As major drivers in the evolution of (terrestrial) fixed and mobile networks, Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) technologies are also being positioned as central technology enablers towards improved and more flexible integration of satellite and terrestrial segments, providing satellite network further service innovation and business agility by advanced network resources management techniques. Through the analysis of scenarios and use cases, this paper provides a description of the benefits that SDN/NFV technologies can bring into satellite communications towards 5G. Three scenarios are presented and analysed to delineate different potential improvement areas pursued through the introduction of SDN/NFV technologies in the satellite ground segment domain. Within each scenario, a number of use cases are developed to gain further insight into specific capabilities and to identify the technical challenges stemming from them.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Mobile IP: state of the art report

Due to roaming, a mobile device may change its network attachment each time it moves to a new link. This might cause a disruption for the Internet data packets that have to reach the mobile node. Mobile IP is a protocol, developed by the Mobile IP Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working group, that is able to inform the network about this change in network attachment such that the Internet data packets will be delivered in a seamless way to the new point of attachment. This document presents current developments and research activities in the Mobile IP area

Use of locator/identifier separation to improve the future internet routing system

The Internet evolved from its early days of being a small research network to become a critical infrastructure many organizations and individuals rely on. One dimension of this evolution is the continuous growth of the number of participants in the network, far beyond what the initial designers had in mind. While it does work today, it is widely believed that the current design of the global routing system cannot scale to accommodate future challenges. In 2006 an Internet Architecture Board (IAB) workshop was held to develop a shared understanding of the Internet routing system scalability issues faced by the large backbone operators. The participants documented in RFC 4984 their belief that "routing scalability is the most important problem facing the Internet today and must be solved." A potential solution to the routing scalability problem is ending the semantic overloading of Internet addresses, by separating node location from identity. Several proposals exist to apply this idea to current Internet addressing, among which the Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) is the only one already being shipped in production routers. Separating locators from identifiers results in another level of indirection, and introduces a new problem: how to determine location, when the identity is known. The first part of our work analyzes existing proposals for systems that map identifiers to locators and proposes an alternative system, within the LISP ecosystem. We created a large-scale Internet topology simulator and used it to compare the performance of three mapping systems: LISP-DHT, LISP+ALT and the proposed LISP-TREE. We analyzed and contrasted their architectural properties as well. The monitoring projects that supplied Internet routing table growth data over a large timespan inspired us to create LISPmon, a monitoring platform aimed at collecting, storing and presenting data gathered from the LISP pilot network, early in the deployment of the LISP protocol. The project web site and collected data is publicly available and will assist researchers in studying the evolution of the LISP mapping system. We also document how the newly introduced LISP network elements fit into the current Internet, advantages and disadvantages of different deployment options, and how the proposed transition mechanism scenarios could affect the evolution of the global routing system. This work is currently available as an active Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Internet Draft. The second part looks at the problem of efficient one-to-many communications, assuming a routing system that implements the above mentioned locator/identifier split paradigm. We propose a network layer protocol for efficient live streaming. It is incrementally deployable, with changes required only in the same border routers that should be upgraded to support locator/identifier separation. Our proof-of-concept Linux kernel implementation shows the feasibility of the protocol, and our comparison to popular peer-to-peer live streaming systems indicates important savings in inter-domain traffic. We believe LISP has considerable potential of getting adopted, and an important aspect of this work is how it might contribute towards a better mapping system design, by showing the weaknesses of current favorites and proposing alternatives. The presented results are an important step forward in addressing the routing scalability problem described in RFC 4984, and improving the delivery of live streaming video over the Internet

Design of Overlay Networks for Internet Multicast - Doctoral Dissertation, August 2002

Multicast is an efficient transmission scheme for supporting group communication in networks. Contrasted with unicast, where multiple point-to-point connections must be used to support communications among a group of users, multicast is more efficient because each data packet is replicated in the network – at the branching points leading to distinguished destinations, thus reducing the transmission load on the data sources and traffic load on the network links. To implement multicast, networks need to incorporate new routing and forwarding mechanisms in addition to the existing are not adequately supported in the current networks. The IP multicast are not adequately supported in the current networks. The IP multicast solution has serious scaling and deployment limitations, and cannot be easily extended to provide more enhanced data services. Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, IP multicast has ignored the economic nature of the problem, lacking incentives for service providers to deploy the service in wide area networks. Overlay multicast holds promise for the realization of large scale Internet multicast services. An overlay network is a virtual topology constructed on top of the Internet infrastructure. The concept of overlay networks enables multicast to be deployed as a service network rather than a network primitive mechanism, allowing deployment over heterogeneous networks without the need of universal network support. This dissertation addresses the network design aspects of overlay networks to provide scalable multicast services in the Internet. The resources and the network cost in the context of overlay networks are different from that in conventional networks, presenting new challenges and new problems to solve. Our design goal are the maximization of network utility and improved service quality. As the overall network design problem is extremely complex, we divide the problem into three components: the efficient management of session traffic (multicast routing), the provisioning of overlay network resources (bandwidth dimensioning) and overlay topology optimization (service placement). The combined solution provides a comprehensive procedure for planning and managing an overlay multicast network. We also consider a complementary form of overlay multicast called application-level multicast (ALMI). ALMI allows end systems to directly create an overlay multicast session among themselves. This gives applications the flexibility to communicate without relying on service provides. The tradeoff is that users do not have direct control on the topology and data paths taken by the session flows and will typically get lower quality of service due to the best effort nature of the Internet environment. ALMI is therefore suitable for sessions of small size or sessions where all members are well connected to the network. Furthermore, the ALMI framework allows us to experiment with application specific components such as data reliability, in order to identify a useful set of communication semantic for enhanced data services

Survey of Transportation of Adaptive Multimedia Streaming service in Internet

[DE] World Wide Web is the greatest boon towards the technological advancement of modern era. Using the benefits of Internet globally, anywhere and anytime, users can avail the benefits of accessing live and on demand video services. The streaming media systems such as YouTube, Netflix, and Apple Music are reining the multimedia world with frequent popularity among users. A key concern of quality perceived for video streaming applications over Internet is the Quality of Experience (QoE) that users go through. Due to changing network conditions, bit rate and initial delay and the multimedia file freezes or provide poor video quality to the end users, researchers across industry and academia are explored HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS), which split the video content into multiple segments and offer the clients at varying qualities. The video player at the client side plays a vital role in buffer management and choosing the appropriate bit rate for each such segment of video to be transmitted. A higher bit rate transmitted video pauses in between whereas, a lower bit rate video lacks in quality, requiring a tradeoff between them. The need of the hour was to adaptively varying the bit rate and video quality to match the transmission media conditions. Further, The main aim of this paper is to give an overview on the state of the art HAS techniques across multimedia and networking domains. A detailed survey was conducted to analyze challenges and solutions in adaptive streaming algorithms, QoE, network protocols, buffering and etc. It also focuses on various challenges on QoE influence factors in a fluctuating network condition, which are often ignored in present HAS methodologies. Furthermore, this survey will enable network and multimedia researchers a fair amount of understanding about the latest happenings of adaptive streaming and the necessary improvements that can be incorporated in future developments.Abdullah, MTA.; Lloret, J.; Canovas Solbes, A.; García-García, L. (2017). Survey of Transportation of Adaptive Multimedia Streaming service in Internet. Network Protocols and Algorithms. 9(1-2):85-125. doi:10.5296/npa.v9i1-2.12412S8512591-

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