Network-provider-independent overlays for resilience and quality of service.

PhDOverlay networks are viewed as one of the solutions addressing the inefficiency and slow evolution of the Internet and have been the subject of significant research. Most existing overlays providing resilience and/or Quality of Service (QoS) need cooperation among different network providers, but an inter-trust issue arises and cannot be easily solved. In this thesis, we mainly focus on network-provider-independent overlays and investigate their performance in providing two different types of service. Specifically, this thesis addresses the following problems: Provider-independent overlay architecture: A provider-independent overlay framework named Resilient Overlay for Mission-Critical Applications (ROMCA) is proposed. We elaborate its structure including component composition and functions and also provide several operational examples. Overlay topology construction for providing resilience service: We investigate the topology design problem of provider-independent overlays aiming to provide resilience service. To be more specific, based on the ROMCA framework, we formulate this problem mathematically and prove its NP-hardness. Three heuristics are proposed and extensive simulations are carried out to verify their effectiveness. Application mapping with resilience and QoS guarantees: Assuming application mapping is the targeted service for ROMCA, we formulate this problem as an Integer Linear Program (ILP). Moreover, a simple but effective heuristic is proposed to address this issue in a time-efficient manner. Simulations with both synthetic and real networks prove the superiority of both solutions over existing ones. Substrate topology information availability and the impact of its accuracy on overlay performance: Based on our survey that summarizes the methodologies available for inferring the selective substrate topology formed among a group of nodes through active probing, we find that such information is usually inaccurate and additional mechanisms are needed to secure a better inferred topology. Therefore, we examine the impact of inferred substrate topology accuracy on overlay performance given only inferred substrate topology information

End-to-end QoE optimization through overlay network deployment

In this paper an overlay network for end-to-end QoE management is presented. The goal of this infrastructure is QoE optimization by routing around failures in the IP network and optimizing the bandwidth usage on the last mile to the client. The overlay network consists of components that are located both in the core and at the edge of the network. A number of overlay servers perform end-to-end QoS monitoring and maintain an overlay topology, allowing them to route around link failures and congestion. Overlay access components situated at the edge of the network are responsible for determining whether packets are sent to the overlay network, while proxy components manage the bandwidth on the last mile. This paper gives a detailed overview of the end-to-end architecture together with representative experimental results which comprehensively demonstrate the overlay network's ability to optimize the QoE

SecMon: End-to-End Quality and Security Monitoring System

The Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is becoming a more available and popular way of communicating for Internet users. This also applies to Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems and merging these two have already proven to be successful (e.g. Skype). Even the existing standards of VoIP provide an assurance of security and Quality of Service (QoS), however, these features are usually optional and supported by limited number of implementations. As a result, the lack of mandatory and widely applicable QoS and security guaranties makes the contemporary VoIP systems vulnerable to attacks and network disturbances. In this paper we are facing these issues and propose the SecMon system, which simultaneously provides a lightweight security mechanism and improves quality parameters of the call. SecMon is intended specially for VoIP service over P2P networks and its main advantage is that it provides authentication, data integrity services, adaptive QoS and (D)DoS attack detection. Moreover, the SecMon approach represents a low-bandwidth consumption solution that is transparent to the users and possesses a self-organizing capability. The above-mentioned features are accomplished mainly by utilizing two information hiding techniques: digital audio watermarking and network steganography. These techniques are used to create covert channels that serve as transport channels for lightweight QoS measurement's results. Furthermore, these metrics are aggregated in a reputation system that enables best route path selection in the P2P network. The reputation system helps also to mitigate (D)DoS attacks, maximize performance and increase transmission efficiency in the network.Comment: Paper was presented at 7th international conference IBIZA 2008: On Computer Science - Research And Applications, Poland, Kazimierz Dolny 31.01-2.02 2008; 14 pages, 5 figure

Management and Service-aware Networking Architectures (MANA) for Future Internet Position Paper: System Functions, Capabilities and Requirements

Future Internet (FI) research and development threads have recently been gaining momentum all over the world and as such the international race to create a new generation Internet is in full swing: GENI, Asia Future Internet, Future Internet Forum Korea, European Union Future Internet Assembly (FIA). This is a position paper identifying the research orientation with a time horizon of 10 years, together with the key challenges for the capabilities in the Management and Service-aware Networking Architectures (MANA) part of the Future Internet (FI) allowing for parallel and federated Internet(s)

SPAD: a distributed middleware architecture for QoS enhanced alternate path discovery

In the next generation Internet, the network will evolve from a plain communication medium into one that provides endless services to the users. These services will be composed of multiple cooperative distributed application elements. We name these services overlay applications. The cooperative application elements within an overlay application will build a dynamic communication mesh, namely an overlay association. The Quality of Service (QoS) perceived by the users of an overlay application greatly depends on the QoS experienced on the communication paths of the corresponding overlay association. In this paper, we present SPAD (Super-Peer Alternate path Discovery), a distributed middleware architecture that aims at providing enhanced QoS between end-points within an overlay association. To achieve this goal, SPAD provides a complete scheme to discover and utilize composite alternate end-to end paths with better QoS than the path given by the default IP routing mechanisms

A Knowledge-Based Service Composition Algorithm with Better QoS in Semantic Overlay

A semantic overlay network (SON) is a visual framework clustered under similar metaknowledge units such as ontologies, algorithms, and rule engines. Knowledge-based service composition (KC) has become a prominent aspect of building new and creative composed service through a combination of semantically similar information at the knowledge level. In this study, a promising approach to construct a standard knowledge model is developed to utilize the progress of KC. To evaluate and optimize the composition, we define the quantity of service (QoS) regarding user requirements in the KC instance, and a KC instance path with better QoS is found in the model using the KC algorithm. Simulation results prove that our approach has a tradeoff between efficiency and equality