Internames: a name-to-name principle for the future Internet

We propose Internames, an architectural framework in which names are used to identify all entities involved in communication: contents, users, devices, logical as well as physical points involved in the communication, and services. By not having a static binding between the name of a communication entity and its current location, we allow entities to be mobile, enable them to be reached by any of a number of basic communication primitives, enable communication to span networks with different technologies and allow for disconnected operation. Furthermore, with the ability to communicate between names, the communication path can be dynamically bound to any of a number of end-points, and the end-points themselves could change as needed. A key benefit of our architecture is its ability to accommodate gradual migration from the current IP infrastructure to a future that may be a ubiquitous Information Centric Network. Basic building blocks of Internames are: i) a name-based Application Programming Interface; ii) a separation of identifiers (names) and locators; iii) a powerful Name Resolution Service (NRS) that dynamically maps names to locators, as a function of time/location/context/service; iv) a built-in capacity of evolution, allowing a transparent migration from current networks and the ability to include as particular cases current specific architectures. To achieve this vision, shared by many other researchers, we exploit and expand on Information Centric Networking principles, extending ICN functionality beyond content retrieval, easing send-to-name and push services, and allowing to use names also to route data in the return path. A key role in this architecture is played by the NRS, which allows for the co-existence of multiple network "realms", including current IP and non-IP networks, glued together by a name-to-name overarching communication primitive.Comment: 6 page

The state of peer-to-peer network simulators

Networking research often relies on simulation in order to test and evaluate new ideas. An important requirement of this process is that results must be reproducible so that other researchers can replicate, validate and extend existing work. We look at the landscape of simulators for research in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks by conducting a survey of a combined total of over 280 papers from before and after 2007 (the year of the last survey in this area), and comment on the large quantity of research using bespoke, closed-source simulators. We propose a set of criteria that P2P simulators should meet, and poll the P2P research community for their agreement. We aim to drive the community towards performing their experiments on simulators that allow for others to validate their results

Security and Privacy of IP-ICN Coexistence: A Comprehensive Survey

Internet usage has changed from its first design. Hence, the current Internet must cope with some limitations, including performance degradation, availability of IP addresses, and multiple security and privacy issues. Nevertheless, to unsettle the current Internet's network layer i.e., Internet Protocol with ICN is a challenging, expensive task. It also requires worldwide coordination among Internet Service Providers , backbone, and Autonomous Services. Additionally, history showed that technology changes e.g., from 3G to 4G, from IPv4 to IPv6 are not immediate, and usually, the replacement includes a long coexistence period between the old and new technology. Similarly, we believe that the process of replacement of the current Internet will surely transition through the coexistence of IP and ICN. Although the tremendous amount of security and privacy issues of the current Internet taught us the importance of securely designing the architectures, only a few of the proposed architectures place the security-by-design. Therefore, this article aims to provide the first comprehensive Security and Privacy analysis of the state-of-the-art coexistence architectures. Additionally, it yields a horizontal comparison of security and privacy among three deployment approaches of IP and ICN protocol i.e., overlay, underlay, and hybrid and a vertical comparison among ten considered security and privacy features. As a result of our analysis, emerges that most of the architectures utterly fail to provide several SP features including data and traffic flow confidentiality, availability and communication anonymity. We believe this article draws a picture of the secure combination of current and future protocol stacks during the coexistence phase that the Internet will definitely walk across

FatPaths: Routing in Supercomputers and Data Centers when Shortest Paths Fall Short

We introduce FatPaths: a simple, generic, and robust routing architecture that enables state-of-the-art low-diameter topologies such as Slim Fly to achieve unprecedented performance. FatPaths targets Ethernet stacks in both HPC supercomputers as well as cloud data centers and clusters. FatPaths exposes and exploits the rich ("fat") diversity of both minimal and non-minimal paths for high-performance multi-pathing. Moreover, FatPaths uses a redesigned "purified" transport layer that removes virtually all TCP performance issues (e.g., the slow start), and incorporates flowlet switching, a technique used to prevent packet reordering in TCP networks, to enable very simple and effective load balancing. Our design enables recent low-diameter topologies to outperform powerful Clos designs, achieving 15% higher net throughput at 2x lower latency for comparable cost. FatPaths will significantly accelerate Ethernet clusters that form more than 50% of the Top500 list and it may become a standard routing scheme for modern topologies

Enhancing TCP Performance in Mobile Ad Hoc Network Using Explicit Link Failure Notification (ELFN)

The dynamics and the unpredictable behaviour of a wireless mobile ad hoc network results in the hindrance of providing adequate reliability to network connections. Frequent route changes in the network relatively introduce incessant link failures which eventually degrade TCP performance considerably. In this research, we are going to study the potential improvement of TCP performance when Explicit Link Failure Notification is implemented as opposed to the standard TCP mechanism. ELFN modifies the ‘slow start’ mechanism that is used in standard TCP so that the throughput achieved from the network can be maximized

Network overload avoidance by traffic engineering and content caching

The Internet traffic volume continues to grow at a great rate, now driven by video and TV distribution. For network operators it is important to avoid congestion in the network, and to meet service level agreements with their customers. This thesis presents work on two methods operators can use to reduce links loads in their networks: traffic engineering and content caching. This thesis studies access patterns for TV and video and the potential for caching. The investigation is done both using simulation and by analysis of logs from a large TV-on-Demand system over four months. The results show that there is a small set of programs that account for a large fraction of the requests and that a comparatively small local cache can be used to significantly reduce the peak link loads during prime time. The investigation also demonstrates how the popularity of programs changes over time and shows that the access pattern in a TV-on-Demand system very much depends on the content type. For traffic engineering the objective is to avoid congestion in the network and to make better use of available resources by adapting the routing to the current traffic situation. The main challenge for traffic engineering in IP networks is to cope with the dynamics of Internet traffic demands. This thesis proposes L-balanced routings that route the traffic on the shortest paths possible but make sure that no link is utilised to more than a given level L. L-balanced routing gives efficient routing of traffic and controlled spare capacity to handle unpredictable changes in traffic. We present an L-balanced routing algorithm and a heuristic search method for finding L-balanced weight settings for the legacy routing protocols OSPF and IS-IS. We show that the search and the resulting weight settings work well in real network scenarios

A scheme for efficient peer-to-peer live video streaming over wireless mesh networks

Peers in a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) live video streaming system over hybrid wireless mesh networks (WMNs) enjoy high video quality when both random network coding (RNC) and an efficient hybrid routing protocol are employed. Although RNC is the most recently used method of efficient video streaming, it imposes high transmission overhead and decoding computational complexity on the network which reduces the perceived video quality. Besides that, RNC cannot guaranty a non-existence of linear dependency in the generated coefficients matrix. In WMNs, node mobility has not been efficiently addressed by current hybrid routing protocols that increase video distortion which would lead to low video quality. In addition, these protocols cannot efficiently support nodes which operate in infrastructure mode. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to propose a P2P live video streaming scheme which consists of two phases followed by the integration of these two phases known as the third phase to provide high video quality in hybrid WMNs. In the first phase, a novel coefficients matrix generation and inversion method has been proposed to address the mentioned limitations of RNC. In the second phase, the proposed enhanced hybrid routing protocol was used to efficiently route video streams among nodes using the most stable path with low routing overhead. Moreover, this protocol effectively supports mobility and nodes which operate in infrastructure mode by exploiting the advantages of the designed locator service. Results of simulations from the first phase showed that video distortion as the most important performance metric in live video streaming, had improved by 36 percent in comparison with current RNC method which employs the Gauss-Jordan Elimination (RNC-GJE) method in decoding. Other metrics including frame dependency distortion, initial start-up delay and end-to-end delay have also improved using the proposed method. Based on previous studies, although Reactive (DYMO) routing protocol provides better performance than other existing routing protocols in a hybrid WMN, the proposed protocol in the second phase had average improvements in video distortion of l86% for hybrid wireless mesh protocol (HWMP), 49% for Reactive (Dynamic MANET On-Demand-DYMO), 75% for Proactive (Optimized Link State Routing-OLSR), and 60% for Ad-hoc on-demand Distance Vector Spanning-Tree (AODV-ST). Other metrics including end-to-end delay, packet delay variation, routing overhead and number of delivered video frames have also improved using the proposed protocol. Finally, the third phase, an integration of the first two phases has proven to be an efficient scheme for high quality P2P live video streaming over hybrid WMNs. This video streaming scheme had averagely improved video distortion by 41%, frame dependency distortion by 50%, initial start-up delay by 15% and end-to-end delay by 33% in comparison with the average introduced values by three other considered integration cases which are Reactive and RNC-GJE, Reactive and the first phase, the second phase and RNC-GJE

Wireless industrial monitoring and control networks: the journey so far and the road ahead

While traditional wired communication technologies have played a crucial role in industrial monitoring and control networks over the past few decades, they are increasingly proving to be inadequate to meet the highly dynamic and stringent demands of today’s industrial applications, primarily due to the very rigid nature of wired infrastructures. Wireless technology, however, through its increased pervasiveness, has the potential to revolutionize the industry, not only by mitigating the problems faced by wired solutions, but also by introducing a completely new class of applications. While present day wireless technologies made some preliminary inroads in the monitoring domain, they still have severe limitations especially when real-time, reliable distributed control operations are concerned. This article provides the reader with an overview of existing wireless technologies commonly used in the monitoring and control industry. It highlights the pros and cons of each technology and assesses the degree to which each technology is able to meet the stringent demands of industrial monitoring and control networks. Additionally, it summarizes mechanisms proposed by academia, especially serving critical applications by addressing the real-time and reliability requirements of industrial process automation. The article also describes certain key research problems from the physical layer communication for sensor networks and the wireless networking perspective that have yet to be addressed to allow the successful use of wireless technologies in industrial monitoring and control networks