Deliverable JRA1.1: Evaluation of current network control and management planes for multi-domain network infrastructure

This deliverable includes a compilation and evaluation of available control and management architectures and protocols applicable to a multilayer infrastructure in a multi-domain Virtual Network environment.The scope of this deliverable is mainly focused on the virtualisation of the resources within a network and at processing nodes. The virtualization of the FEDERICA infrastructure allows the provisioning of its available resources to users by means of FEDERICA slices. A slice is seen by the user as a real physical network under his/her domain, however it maps to a logical partition (a virtual instance) of the physical FEDERICA resources. A slice is built to exhibit to the highest degree all the principles applicable to a physical network (isolation, reproducibility, manageability, ...). Currently, there are no standard definitions available for network virtualization or its associated architectures. Therefore, this deliverable proposes the Virtual Network layer architecture and evaluates a set of Management- and Control Planes that can be used for the partitioning and virtualization of the FEDERICA network resources. This evaluation has been performed taking into account an initial set of FEDERICA requirements; a possible extension of the selected tools will be evaluated in future deliverables. The studies described in this deliverable define the virtual architecture of the FEDERICA infrastructure. During this activity, the need has been recognised to establish a new set of basic definitions (taxonomy) for the building blocks that compose the so-called slice, i.e. the virtual network instantiation (which is virtual with regard to the abstracted view made of the building blocks of the FEDERICA infrastructure) and its architectural plane representation. These definitions will be established as a common nomenclature for the FEDERICA project. Other important aspects when defining a new architecture are the user requirements. It is crucial that the resulting architecture fits the demands that users may have. Since this deliverable has been produced at the same time as the contact process with users, made by the project activities related to the Use Case definitions, JRA1 has proposed a set of basic Use Cases to be considered as starting point for its internal studies. When researchers want to experiment with their developments, they need not only network resources on their slices, but also a slice of the processing resources. These processing slice resources are understood as virtual machine instances that users can use to make them behave as software routers or end nodes, on which to download the software protocols or applications they have produced and want to assess in a realistic environment. Hence, this deliverable also studies the APIs of several virtual machine management software products in order to identify which best suits FEDERICA’s needs.Postprint (published version

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

ENVIRONMENTAL-IMPACT EXTENSIONS FOR TRACEROUTE AND PING

The computer network diagnostic facilities traceroute and ping are arguably some of the most used networking troubleshooting tools. Augmenting those facilities to present environmental and sustainability data and metadata would contribute to gain visibility on “green metrics” on the Internet, an objective mentioned in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) E-Impact initiative. Techniques are presented herein that support Environmental-Impact extensions (or “E-Impact” extensions for short) to both traceroute and ping. The presented extensions are backwards compatible and potentially provide per-hop (e.g., per networking topological node) power metrics, estimated greenhouse gas (GHG) emission numbers, and potentially other current or future sustainability metrics. Aspects of the presented techniques support a combination of in-packet (e.g., Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) extensions) plus out-of-band (e.g., out of band database lookup or application programming interface (API) calls from a host) methods that, together, yield the above-described new metrics. The presented techniques are useful not only in a transactional setting (e.g., a user desired to find some information so they issue a traceroute or a ping request) but they may also be run periodically in a mesh across the Internet or across an administrative domain to map out environmental-impact metrics, including energy usage, power and normalized power, and estimated GHG emissions

Path signalling in a wireless back-haul network integrating unidirectional broadcast technologies

The black-haul infrastructures of today's wireless operators must support the triple-play services demanded by the market or regulatory bodies. To cope with increasing capacity demand, in our previous work, we have developed a cost-effective heterogeneous layer 2.5 wireless back-haul (WiBACK) architecture, which leverages the native multicast capabilities of broadcast technologies such as DVB to off-load high-bandwidth broadcast content delivery. Furthermore, our architecture provides support for unidirectional technologies on the data and the control plane. This adopts a centralized coordinator approach, in which coordinator nodes install so-called management and data pipes. No routing state is kept at plain WiBACK nodes, which merely store QoS-aware pipe forwarding state. Consequently, the architecture requires a reliable protocol to push resource allocation and pipe forwarding state into the network, considering possibly unidirectional connectivity. Such a protocol, whose task is related to MPLS label distribution, is essential during the initial forming of WiBACK topologies and during regular network operations to reliably manage the data pipes. In this paper, we present a novel approach to extend our IEEE 802.21-inspired WiBACK TransportService and, based upon this, the design of an RSVP-TE-style pipe signalling protocol using nested hop-by-hop request/response MIH transactions that supports signalling over unidirectional technologies. A thorough evaluation and successful testbed deployments show that this protocol reliably signals pipe state even under high loss conditions

Mobile Networks

The growth in the use of mobile networks has come mainly with the third generation systems and voice traffic. With the current third generation and the arrival of the 4G, the number of mobile users in the world will exceed the number of landlines users. Audio and video streaming have had a significant increase, parallel to the requirements of bandwidth and quality of service demanded by those applications. Mobile networks require that the applications and protocols that have worked successfully in fixed networks can be used with the same level of quality in mobile scenarios. Until the third generation of mobile networks, the need to ensure reliable handovers was still an important issue. On the eve of a new generation of access networks (4G) and increased connectivity between networks of different characteristics commonly called hybrid (satellite, ad-hoc, sensors, wired, WIMAX, LAN, etc.), it is necessary to transfer mechanisms of mobility to future generations of networks. In order to achieve this, it is essential to carry out a comprehensive evaluation of the performance of current protocols and the diverse topologies to suit the new mobility conditions

Vergleich von QoS- und Mobilitätsmechanismen in Backhaul-Netzen für 4G Mobilfunk

Die vorliegende Diplomarbeit behandelt den Vergleich von QoS- und Mobilitätsmechanismen in der LTE/SAE-Architektur. Nach der Einführung in die LTE/SAE-Architektur wird dargestellt, wie die QoS und die Mobilität im Standard des 3GPP gewährleitet wird. Danach erfolgt eine Untersuchung der Technologien PMIP, Ethernet und MPLS, ob sie sich als Alternativen für die standardisierten Mechanismen eignen. In einem weiteren Kapitel wird ein eigenes Konzept zur QoS- und Mobilitätsverwaltung vorgestellt, und es erfolgen erste Betrachtungen. Abschließend wird ein Ausblick gegeben, wie das vorgestellte eigene Konzept weiter ausgebaut werden könnte

An Analysis of the MOS under Conditions of Delay, Jitter and Packet Loss and an Analysis of the Impact of Introducing Piggybacking and Reed Solomon FEC for VOIP

Voice over IP (VoIP) is a real time application that allows transmitting voice through the Internet network. Recently there has been amazing progress in this field, mainly due to the development of voice codecs that react appropriately under conditions of packet loss, and the improvement of intelligent jitter buffers that perform better under conditions of variable inter packet delay. In addition, there are other factors that indirectly benefited VoIP. Today, computer networks are faster due to the advances in hardware and breakthrough algorithms. As a result, the quality of VoIP calls has improved considerably. However, the quality of VoIP calls under extreme conditions of packet loss still remains a major problem that needs to be addressed for the next generation of VoIP services. This thesis concentrates in making an analysis of the effects that network impairments, such as: delay, jitter, and packet loss have in the quality of VoIP calls and approaches to solve this problem. Finally, we analyze the impact of introducing forward error correction (FEC) Piggybacking and Reed Solomon codes for VoIP. To measure the mean opinion score of VoIP calls we develop an application based on the E-Model, and utilize perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ)

Design of CISCO network analysis by VePAL TX300 Analyzer

Tato bakalářská práce se skládá z popisu laboratorní sítě Cisco, možnostech analýzy sítí pomocí analyzátorů VePAL TX300 a SunSET MTT, vytvoření manuálu k analyzátoru VePAL TX300 a návrhu tří laboratorních úloh. První úloha analyzuje přenosové parametry laboratorní sítě Cisco. Druhá úloha porovnává parametry dvou rozdílných typů směrovačů. Ve třetí úloze jsou analyzovány služby VoIP a IPTV, zejména kvalitativní parametry.This bachelor´s work consists of describing the network Cisco, possibilities of network analysis with analyzer VePAL TX300 and Sunset MTT, creation of manual for the analyzer VePAL TX300 and draft three laboratory exercises. The first exercise analyzes transmission parameters of the network Cisco. The second exercise compares parameters of two different types of routers. The third exercise analysis VoIP and IPTV services, especially qualitative parameters.