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

OSHI - Open Source Hybrid IP/SDN networking (and its emulation on Mininet and on distributed SDN testbeds)

The introduction of SDN in IP backbones requires the coexistence of regular IP forwarding and SDN based forwarding. The former is typically applied to best effort Internet traffic, the latter can be used for different types of advanced services (VPNs, Virtual Leased Lines, Traffic Engineering...). In this paper we first introduce the architecture and the services of an "hybrid" IP/SDN networking scenario. Then we describe the design and implementation of an Open Source Hybrid IP/SDN (OSHI) node. It combines Quagga for OSPF routing and Open vSwitch for OpenFlow based switching on Linux. The availability of tools for experimental validation and performance evaluation of SDN solutions is fundamental for the evolution of SDN. We provide a set of open source tools that allow to facilitate the design of hybrid IP/SDN experimental networks, their deployment on Mininet or on distributed SDN research testbeds and their test. Finally, using the provided tools, we evaluate key performance aspects of the proposed solutions. The OSHI development and test environment is available in a VirtualBox VM image that can be downloaded.Comment: Final version (Last updated August, 2014

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