862 research outputs found
SDN as Active Measurement Infrastructure
Active measurements are integral to the operation and management of networks,
and invaluable to supporting empirical network research. Unfortunately, it is
often cost-prohibitive and logistically difficult to widely deploy measurement
nodes, especially in the core. In this work, we consider the feasibility of
tightly integrating measurement within the infrastructure by using Software
Defined Networks (SDNs). We introduce "SDN as Active Measurement
Infrastructure" (SAAMI) to enable measurements to originate from any location
where SDN is deployed, removing the need for dedicated measurement nodes and
increasing vantage point diversity. We implement ping and traceroute using
SAAMI, as well as a proof-of-concept custom measurement protocol to demonstrate
the power and ease of SAAMI's open framework. Via a large-scale measurement
campaign using SDN switches as vantage points, we show that SAAMI is accurate,
scalable, and extensible
Cloud and mobile infrastructure monitoring for latency and bandwidth sensitive applications
This PhD thesis involves the study of cloud computing infrastructures (from the networking perspective) to assess the feasibility of applications gaining increasing popularity over recent years, including multimedia and telemedicine applications, demanding low, bounded latency and sufficient bandwidth.
I also focus on the case of telemedicine, where remote imaging applications (for example, telepathology or telesurgery) need to achieve a low and stable latency for the remote transmission of images, and also for the remote control of such equipment.
Another important use case for telemedicine is denoted as remote computation, which involves the offloading of image processing to help diagnosis; also in this case, bandwidth and latency requirements should be enforced to ensure timely results, although they are less strict compared to the previous scenario.
Nowadays, the capability of gaining access to IT resources in a rapid and on-demand fashion, according to a pay-as-you-go model, has made the cloud computing a key-enabler for innovative multimedia and telemedicine services.
However, the partial obscurity of cloud performance, and also security concerns are still hindering the adoption of cloud infrastructure.
To ensure that the requirements of applications running on the cloud are satisfied, there is the need to design and evaluate proper methodologies, according to the metric of interest.
Moreover, some kinds of applications have specific requirements that cannot be satisfied by the current cloud infrastructure.
In particular, since the cloud computing involves communication to remote servers, two problems arise: firstly, the core network infrastructure can be overloaded, considering the massive amount of data that has to flow through it to allow clients to reach the datacenters; secondly, the latency resulting from this remote interaction between clients and servers is increased.
For these, and many other cases also beyond the field of telemedicine, the Edge and Fog computing paradigms were introduced.
In these new paradigms, the IT resources are deployed not only in the core cloud datacenters, but also at the edge of the network, either in the telecom operator access network or even leveraging other users' devices.
The proximity of resources to end-users allows to alleviate the burden on the core network and at the same time to reduce latency towards users.
Indeed, the latency from users to remote cloud datacenters encompasses delays from the access and core networks, as well as the intra-datacenter delay.
Therefore, this latency is expected to be higher than that required to interconnect users to edge servers, which in the envisioned paradigm are deployed in the access network, that is, nearby final users.
Therefore, the edge latency is expected to be reduced to only a portion of the overall cloud delay.
Moreover, the edge and central resources can be used in conjunction, and therefore attention to core cloud monitoring is of capital importance even when edge architectures will have a widespread adoption, which is not the case yet.
While a lot of research work has been presented for monitoring several network-related metrics, such as bandwidth, latency, jitter and packet loss, less attention was given to the monitoring of latency in cloud and edge cloud infrastructures.
In detail, while some works target cloud-latency monitoring, the evaluation is lacking a fine-grained analysis of latency considering spatial and temporal trends.
Furthermore, the widespread adoption of mobile devices, and the Internet of Things paradigm further accelerate the shift towards the cloud paradigm for the additional benefits it can provide in this context, allowing energy savings and augmenting the computation capabilities of these devices, creating a new scenario denoted as mobile cloud.
This scenario poses additional challenges for its bandwidth constraints, accentuating the need for tailored methodologies that can ensure that the crucial requirements of the aforementioned applications can be met by the current infrastructure.
In this sense, there is still a gap of works monitoring bandwidth-related metrics in mobile networks, especially when performing in-the-wild assessment targeting actual mobile networks and operators.
Moreover, even the few works testing real scenarios typically consider only one provider in one country for a limited period of time, lacking an in-depth assessment of bandwidth variability over space and time.
In this thesis, I therefore consider monitoring methodologies for challenging scenarios, focusing on latency perceived by customers of public cloud providers, and bandwidth in mobile broadband networks.
Indeed, as described, achieving low latency is a critical requirement for core cloud infrastructures, while providing enough bandwidth is still challenging in mobile networks compared to wired settings, even with the adoption of 4G mobile broadband networks, expecting to overcome this issue only with the widespread availability of 5G connections (with half of total traffic expected to come from 5G networks by 2026).
Therefore, in the research activities carried on during my PhD, I focused on monitoring latency and bandwidth on cloud and mobile infrastructures, assessing to which extent the current public cloud infrastructure and mobile network make multimedia and telemedicine applications (as well as others having similar requirements) feasible
IoT Sentinel: Automated Device-Type Identification for Security Enforcement in IoT
With the rapid growth of the Internet-of-Things (IoT), concerns about the
security of IoT devices have become prominent. Several vendors are producing
IP-connected devices for home and small office networks that often suffer from
flawed security designs and implementations. They also tend to lack mechanisms
for firmware updates or patches that can help eliminate security
vulnerabilities. Securing networks where the presence of such vulnerable
devices is given, requires a brownfield approach: applying necessary protection
measures within the network so that potentially vulnerable devices can coexist
without endangering the security of other devices in the same network. In this
paper, we present IOT SENTINEL, a system capable of automatically identifying
the types of devices being connected to an IoT network and enabling enforcement
of rules for constraining the communications of vulnerable devices so as to
minimize damage resulting from their compromise. We show that IOT SENTINEL is
effective in identifying device types and has minimal performance overhead
An Overview on Application of Machine Learning Techniques in Optical Networks
Today's telecommunication networks have become sources of enormous amounts of
widely heterogeneous data. This information can be retrieved from network
traffic traces, network alarms, signal quality indicators, users' behavioral
data, etc. Advanced mathematical tools are required to extract meaningful
information from these data and take decisions pertaining to the proper
functioning of the networks from the network-generated data. Among these
mathematical tools, Machine Learning (ML) is regarded as one of the most
promising methodological approaches to perform network-data analysis and enable
automated network self-configuration and fault management. The adoption of ML
techniques in the field of optical communication networks is motivated by the
unprecedented growth of network complexity faced by optical networks in the
last few years. Such complexity increase is due to the introduction of a huge
number of adjustable and interdependent system parameters (e.g., routing
configurations, modulation format, symbol rate, coding schemes, etc.) that are
enabled by the usage of coherent transmission/reception technologies, advanced
digital signal processing and compensation of nonlinear effects in optical
fiber propagation. In this paper we provide an overview of the application of
ML to optical communications and networking. We classify and survey relevant
literature dealing with the topic, and we also provide an introductory tutorial
on ML for researchers and practitioners interested in this field. Although a
good number of research papers have recently appeared, the application of ML to
optical networks is still in its infancy: to stimulate further work in this
area, we conclude the paper proposing new possible research directions
Optimal Elephant Flow Detection
Monitoring the traffic volumes of elephant flows, including the total byte
count per flow, is a fundamental capability for online network measurements. We
present an asymptotically optimal algorithm for solving this problem in terms
of both space and time complexity. This improves on previous approaches, which
can only count the number of packets in constant time. We evaluate our work on
real packet traces, demonstrating an up to X2.5 speedup compared to the best
alternative.Comment: Accepted to IEEE INFOCOM 201
Big Data for Traffic Monitoring and Management
The last two decades witnessed tremendous advances in the Information and
Communications Technologies. Beside improvements in computational power and
storage capacity, communication networks carry nowadays an amount of data which
was not envisaged only few years ago. Together with their pervasiveness,
network complexity increased at the same pace, leaving operators and
researchers with few instruments to understand what happens in the networks,
and, on the global scale, on the Internet. Fortunately, recent advances in data
science and machine learning come to the rescue of network analysts, and allow
analyses with a level of complexity and spatial/temporal scope not possible
only 10 years ago. In my thesis, I take the perspective of an Internet Service
Provider (ISP), and illustrate challenges and possibilities of analyzing the
traffic coming from modern operational networks. I make use of big data and
machine learning algorithms, and apply them to datasets coming from passive
measurements of ISP and University Campus networks. The marriage between data
science and network measurements is complicated by the complexity of machine
learning algorithms, and by the intrinsic multi-dimensionality and variability
of this kind of data. As such, my work proposes and evaluates novel techniques,
inspired from popular machine learning approaches, but carefully tailored to
operate with network traffic
Quality of Experience monitoring and management strategies for future smart networks
One of the major driving forces of the service and network's provider market is the user's perceived service quality and expectations, which are referred to as user's Quality of Experience (QoE). It is evident that QoE is particularly critical for network providers, who are challenged with the multimedia engineering problems (e.g. processing, compression) typical of traditional networks. They need to have the right QoE monitoring and management mechanisms to have a significant impact on their budget (e.g. by reducing the users‘ churn). Moreover, due to the rapid growth of mobile networks and multimedia services, it is crucial for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to accurately monitor and manage the QoE for the delivered services and at the same time keep the computational resources and the power consumption at low levels. The objective of this thesis is to investigate the issue of QoE monitoring and management for future networks. This research, developed during the PhD programme, aims to describe the State-of-the-Art and the concept of Virtual Probes (vProbes). Then, I proposed a QoE monitoring and management solution, two Agent-based solutions for QoE monitoring in LTE-Advanced networks, a QoE monitoring solution for multimedia services in 5G networks and an SDN-based approach for QoE management of multimedia services
Big Data for Traffic Monitoring and Management
The last two decades witnessed tremendous advances in the Information and Com-
munications Technologies. Beside improvements in computational power and storage
capacity, communication networks carry nowadays an amount of data which was not
envisaged only few years ago. Together with their pervasiveness, network complexity
increased at the same pace, leaving operators and researchers with few instruments to
understand what happens in the networks, and, on the global scale, on the Internet.
Fortunately, recent advances in data science and machine learning come to the res-
cue of network analysts, and allow analyses with a level of complexity and spatial/tem-
poral scope not possible only 10 years ago. In my thesis, I take the perspective of an In-
ternet Service Provider (ISP), and illustrate challenges and possibilities of analyzing the
traffic coming from modern operational networks. I make use of big data and machine
learning algorithms, and apply them to datasets coming from passive measurements of
ISP and University Campus networks. The marriage between data science and network
measurements is complicated by the complexity of machine learning algorithms, and
by the intrinsic multi-dimensionality and variability of this kind of data. As such, my
work proposes and evaluates novel techniques, inspired from popular machine learning
approaches, but carefully tailored to operate with network traffic.
In this thesis, I first provide a thorough characterization of the Internet traffic from
2013 to 2018. I show the most important trends in the composition of traffic and users’
habits across the last 5 years, and describe how the network infrastructure of Internet
big players changed in order to support faster and larger traffic. Then, I show the chal-
lenges in classifying network traffic, with particular attention to encryption and to the
convergence of Internet around few big players. To overcome the limitations of classical
approaches, I propose novel algorithms for traffic classification and management lever-
aging machine learning techniques, and, in particular, big data approaches. Exploiting
temporal correlation among network events, and benefiting from large datasets of op-
erational traffic, my algorithms learn common traffic patterns of web services, and use
them for (i) traffic classification and (ii) fine-grained traffic management. My proposals
are always validated in experimental environments, and, then, deployed in real opera-
tional networks, from which I report the most interesting findings I obtain. I also focus
on the Quality of Experience (QoE) of web users, as their satisfaction represents the
final objective of computer networks. Again, I show that using big data approaches, the
network can achieve visibility on the quality of web browsing of users. In general, the
algorithms I propose help ISPs have a detailed view of traffic that flows in their network,
allowing fine-grained traffic classification and management, and real-time monitoring
of users QoE
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