The MobyDick Project: A Mobile Heterogeneous All-IP Architecture

Proceedings of Advanced Technologies, Applications and Market Strategies for 3G (ATAMS 2001). Cracow, Poland: 17-20 June, 2001.This paper presents the current stage of an IP-based architecture for heterogeneous environments, covering UMTS-like W-CDMA wireless access technology, wireless and wired LANs, that is being developed under the aegis of the IST Moby Dick project. This architecture treats all transmission capabilities as basic physical and data-link layers, and attempts to replace all higher-level tasks by IP-based strategies. The proposed architecture incorporates aspects of mobile-IPv6, fast handover, AAA-control, and Quality of Service. The architecture allows for an optimised control on the radio link layer resources. The Moby dick architecture is currently under refinement for implementation on field trials. The services planned for trials are data transfer and voice-over-IP.Publicad

Policy conflict analysis for diffserv quality of service management

Policy-based management provides the ability to (re-)configure differentiated services networks so that desired Quality of Service (QoS) goals are achieved. This requires implementing network provisioning decisions, performing admission control, and adapting bandwidth allocation to emerging traffic demands. A policy-based approach facilitates flexibility and adaptability as policies can be dynamically changed without modifying the underlying implementation. However, inconsistencies may arise in the policy specification. In this paper we provide a comprehensive set of QoS policies for managing Differentiated Services (DiffServ) networks, and classify the possible conflicts that can arise between them. We demonstrate the use of Event Calculus and formal reasoning for the analysis of both static and dynamic conflicts in a semi-automated fashion. In addition, we present a conflict analysis tool that provides network administrators with a user-friendly environment for determining and resolving potential inconsistencies. The tool has been extensively tested with large numbers of policies over a range of conflict types

NETQOS policy management architecture for flexible QOS provisioning in Future Internet

This paper is focussed on the NETQOS architecture for automated QoS policy provisioning, which can be used in Future Internet scenarios by the different actors (i.e. network operators, service providers, and users) for flexible QoS configuration over combinations of mobile, fixed, sensor and broadcast networks. The NETQOS policy management architecture opens the possibility to specify QoS policies on a "business" level using ontology descriptions and policy management interfaces, which are specific to the actors. The business level policy specifications are translated by the NETQOS system into intermediate and operational QoS policies for automated QoS configuration at the managed heterogeneous network and transport entities. NETQOS allows QoS policy specification and dependency analysis considering Service Level Agreements (SLAs) between the actors, as well as automated policy provisioning and adaptation. The interaction of the NETQOS components is based on a common po licy repository. The particular focus of the paper is aimed to discuss ontology and actor oriented QoS policy specification and configuration for heterogeneous networks, as well as NETQOS QoS policy management interfaces at business level and automated translation of business QoS policies to intermediate and operational policy level

Security and management policy specification

Accepted versio

Going beyond diffServ in IP traffic classification

Quality of Service (QoS) management in IP networks today relies on static configuration of classes of service definitions and related forwarding priorities. Packets are actually classified according to the DiffServ architecture based on the RFC 4594, typically thanks to static configuration or filters matching packet features, at network access equipment. In this paper, we propose a dynamic classification procedure, referred to as Learning-powered DiffServ (L-DiffServ), able to detect the distinctive characteristics of traffic and to dynamically assign service classes to IP packets. The idea is to apply semi-unsupervised Machine Learning techniques, such as Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) and K-Means, with a proper customization to take into account the issues related to packet-level analysis, i.e. unbalanced distribution of traffic among classes and selection of proper IP header related features. The performance evaluation highlights that L-DiffServ is able to change dynamically the classification outcome, providing an higher number of classes than DiffServ. This last result represents the first step toward a more granular differentiation of IP traffic

Reasoning techniques for analysis and refinement of policies for service management

The work described in this technical report falls under the general problem of developing methods that would allow us to engineer software systems that are reliable and would offer a certain acceptable level of quality in their operation. This report shows how the analysis and refinement of policies for Quality of Service can be carried out within logic by exploiting forms of abductive and argumentative reasoning. In particular, it provides two main contributions. The first is an extension of earlier work on the use of abductive reasoning for automatic policy refinement by exploiting the use of integrity constraints within abduction and its integration with constraint solving. This has allowed us to enhance this refinement process in various ways, e.g. supporting parameter values derivation to quantify abstract refinement to specific policies ready to be put in operation, and calculating utility values to determine optimal refined policies. The second contribution is a new approach for modelling and formulating Quality of Service policies, and more general policies for software requirements, as preference policies within logical frameworks of argumentation. This is shown to be a flexible and declarative approach to the analysis of such policies through high-level semantic queries of argumentation, demonstrated here for the particular case of network firewall policies where the logical framework of argumentation allows us to detect anomalies in the firewalls and facilitates the process of their resolution. To our knowledge this is the first time that the link between argumentation and the specification and analysis of requirement policies has been studied

Policy analysis for DiffServ quality of service management

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Business-driven policy optimization for service management

The performance of services offered by network operators has a direct impact on its reputation, on its revenue due to new customer subscriptions, and also on penalties that can apply when services are not provided to an acceptable quality level. Previous research on business-oriented network and service optimization has mainly focused on optimizing individual business indicators, such as profit and revenue, in isolation without analyzing the effect on network configurations and the subsequent impact on other indicators. Given that different business objectives are usually incompatible, a single network configuration cannot optimize them simultaneously. Determining the configuration and the associated trade-offs that satisfy multiple objectives is a complex task. This paper addresses this gap and presents a framework that derives policy configurations that optimize the business value of the network infrastructure. We describe a methodology to quantify business functions considering the dynamics of network events, the dynamics of end-user service usage, the nature of the business indicators, and their relationships with the underlying control methods. The proposed approach addresses the complexity of the target problem through a surrogate-based optimization approach properly tailored to match our application domain needs. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach through experimentation in a simulation environment we developed over OPNET

Performance enhancement of large scale networks with heterogeneous traffic.

Finally, these findings are applied towards improving the performance of the Differentiated Services architecture by developing a new Refined Assured Forwarding framework where heterogeneous traffic flows share the same aggregate class. The new framework requires minimal modification to the existing Diffserv routers. The efficiency of the new architecture in enhancing the performance of Diffserv is demonstrated by simulation results under different traffic scenarios.This dissertation builds on the notion that segregating traffic with disparate characteristics into separate channels generally results in a better performance. Through a quantitative analysis, it precisely defines the number of classes and the allocation of traffic into these classes that will lead to optimal performance from a latency standpoint. Additionally, it weakens the most generally used assumption of exponential or geometric distribution of traffic service time in the integration versus segregation studies to date by including self-similarity in network traffic.The dissertation also develops a pricing model based on resource usage in a system with segregated channels. Based on analytical results, this dissertation proposes a scheme whereby a service provider can develop compensatory and fair prices for customers with varying QoS requirements under a wide variety of ambient traffic scenarios.This dissertation provides novel techniques for improving the Quality of Service by enhancing the performance of queue management in large scale packet switched networks with a high volume of traffic. Networks combine traffic from multiple sources which have disparate characteristics. Multiplexing such heterogeneous traffic usually results in adverse effects on the overall performance of the network