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

A theoretical framework for network monitoring exploiting segment routing counters

Self-driving networks represent the next step of network management techniques in the close future. A fundamental point for such an evolution is the use of Machine Learning based solutions to extract information from data coming from network devices during their activity. In this work we focus on a new type of data, available thanks to the definition of the novel SRv6 paradigm, referred to as SRv6 Traffic Counters (SRTCs). SRTCs provide aggregated measurements related to forwarding operations performed by SRv6 routers. In this work a detailed description of different SRTCs types (SR.INT, PISD, PSID.TM and POL) is provided and their relationships is formalized. The theoretical framework deployed is used to identify, on the basis of network configuration parameters of both SRv6 and IGP protocols, the minimum set of independent SRTCs to characterize the Network Status: we show that about the 80% of counters can be neglected with no information loss. We also apply our framework to two use cases: i) Traffic Matrix (TM) Assessment and ii) Traffic Anomaly Detection. For the TM assessment, we show that in a partially deployed SRv6 scenario a specific type of SRTCs, i.e., PSID, is more reliable than other ones; on the contrary, in a fully deployed scenario POL and PSID.TM counters provide the full TM knowledge. For the Traffic Anomaly Detection case, we show that known solutions based on link load measurements can be improved when integrating SRTCs information

Real-time detection of grid bulk transfer traffic

The current practice of physical science research has yielded a continuously growing demand for interconnection network bandwidth to support the sharing of large datasets. Academic research networks and internet service providers have provisioned their networks to handle this type of load, which generates prolonged, high-volume traffic between nodes on the network. Maintenance of QoS for all network users demands that the onset of these (Grid bulk) transfers be detected to enable them to be reengineered through resources specifically provisioned to handle this type of traffic. This paper describes a real-time detector that operates at full-line-rate on Gb/s links, operates at high connection rates, and can track the use of ephemeral or non-standard ports

The Dynamics of Internet Traffic: Self-Similarity, Self-Organization, and Complex Phenomena

The Internet is the most complex system ever created in human history. Therefore, its dynamics and traffic unsurprisingly take on a rich variety of complex dynamics, self-organization, and other phenomena that have been researched for years. This paper is a review of the complex dynamics of Internet traffic. Departing from normal treatises, we will take a view from both the network engineering and physics perspectives showing the strengths and weaknesses as well as insights of both. In addition, many less covered phenomena such as traffic oscillations, large-scale effects of worm traffic, and comparisons of the Internet and biological models will be covered.Comment: 63 pages, 7 figures, 7 tables, submitted to Advances in Complex System

The role of the RPL routing protocol for smart grid communications

Advanced communication/networking technologies should be integrated in next-generation power systems (a.k.a. smart grids) to improve their resilience, efficiency, adaptability, and sustainability. Many believe that the smart grid communication infrastructure will emerge from the interconnection of a large number of small-scale networks organized into a hierarchical architecture covering larger geographic areas. In this article, first we carry out a thorough analysis of the key components of the smart grid communication architecture, discussing the different network topologies and communication technologies that could be employed. Special emphasis is given to the advanced metering infrastructure, which will be used to interconnect the smart meters deployed at customers\u27 premises with data aggregators and control centers. The design of scalable, reliable, and efficient networking solutions for AMI systems is an important research problem because these networks are composed of thousands of resource-constrained embedded devices usually interconnected with communication technologies that can provide only low-bandwidth and unreliable links. The IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks was recently standardized by the IETF to specifically meet the requirements of typical AMI applications. In this article we present a thorough overview of the protocol, and we critically analyze its advantages and potential limits in AMI applications. We also conduct a performance evaluation of RPL using a Contiki-based prototype of the RPL standard and a network emulator. Our results indicate that although average performance may appear reasonable for AMI networks, a few RPL nodes may suffer from severe unreliability issues and experience high packet loss rates due to the selection of suboptimal paths with highly unreliable links

Monitoring multicast traffic in heterogeneous networks

Estágio realizado no INESC - Porto e orientado pelo Prof. Doutor Ricardo MorlaTese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores - Major Telecomunicações. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

Network traffic management for the next generation Internet

Measurement-based performance evaluation of network traffic is a fundamental prerequisite for the provisioning of managed and controlled services in short timescales, as well as for enabling the accountability of network resources. The steady introduction and deployment of the Internet Protocol Next Generation (IPNG-IPv6) promises a network address space that can accommodate any device capable of generating a digital heart-beat. Under such a ubiquitous communication environment, Internet traffic measurement becomes of particular importance, especially for the assured provisioning of differentiated levels of service quality to the different application flows. The non-identical response of flows to the different types of network-imposed performance degradation and the foreseeable expansion of networked devices raise the need for ubiquitous measurement mechanisms that can be equally applicable to different applications and transports. This thesis introduces a new measurement technique that exploits native features of IPv6 to become an integral part of the Internet's operation, and to provide intrinsic support for performance measurements at the universally-present network layer. IPv6 Extension Headers have been used to carry both the triggers that invoke the measurement activity and the instantaneous measurement indicators in-line with the payload data itself, providing a high level of confidence that the behaviour of the real user traffic flows is observed. The in-line measurements mechanism has been critically compared and contrasted to existing measurement techniques, and its design and a software-based prototype implementation have been documented. The developed system has been used to provisionally evaluate numerous performance properties of a diverse set of application flows, over different-capacity IPv6 experimental configurations. Through experimentation and theoretical argumentation, it has been shown that IPv6-based, in-line measurements can form the basis for accurate and low-overhead performance assessment of network traffic flows in short time-scales, by being dynamically deployed where and when required in a multi-service Internet environment.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo