Scalable Guaranteed-Bandwidth Multicast Service in Software Defined ISP networks

International audienceNew applications where anyone can broadcast video are becoming very popular on smartphones. With the advent of high definition video, ISP providers may take the opportunity to propose new high quality broadcast services to their clients. Because of its centralized control plane, Software Defined Networking (SDN) seems an ideal way to deploy such a service in a flexible and bandwidth-efficient way. But deploying large scale multicast services on SDN requires smart group membership management and a bandwidth reservation mechanism to support QoS guarantees that should neither waste bandwidth nor impact too severely best effort traffic. In this paper, we propose a Network Function Virtualization based solution for Software Defined ISP networks to implement scalable multicast group management. Then, we propose the Lazy Load balancing Multicast (L2BM) routing algorithm for sharing the network capacity in a friendly way between guaranteed-bandwidth multicast traffic and best-effort traffic. Our implementation of the framework made on Floodlight controllers and Open vSwitches is used to study the performance of L2BM

Requirements of a middleware for managing a large, heterogeneous programmable network

Programmable networking is an increasingly popular area of research in both industry and academia. Although most programmable network research projects seem to focus on the router architecture rather than on issues relating to the management of programmable networks, there are numerous research groups that have incorporated management middleware into the programmable network router software. However, none seem to be concerned with the effective management of a large heterogeneous programmable network. The requirements of such a middleware are outlined in this paper. There are a number of fundamental middleware principles that are addressed in this paper; these include management paradigms, configuration delivery, scalability and transactions. Security, fault tolerance and usability are also examined—although these are not essential parts of the middleware, they must be addressed if the programmable network management middleware is to be accepted by industry and adopted by other research projects

Quality of Service improvements for real time multimedia applications using next generation network architectures and blockchain in Internet Service Provider cooperative scenario

Real time communications are becoming part of our daily life, requiring constrained requisites with the purpose of being enjoyed in harmony by end users. The factors ruling these requisites are Quality of Service parameters of the users' Internet connections. Achieving a satisfactory QoS level for real time communications depends on parameters that are strongly influenced by the quality of the network connections among the Internet Service Providers, which are located in the path between final users and Over The Top service providers that are supplying them with real time services. Final users can be: business people having real time videoconferences, or adopting crytpocurrencies in their exchanges, videogamers playing online games together with others residing in other countries, migrants talking with their relatives or watching their children growing up in their home countries, people with disabilities adopting tecnologies to help them, doctors performing remote surgeries, manufacturers adopting augmented reality devices to perform dangerous tasks. Each of them performing their daily activities are requiring specific QoS parameters to their ISPs, that nowadays seem to be unable to provide them with a satisfactory QoS level for these kinds of real time services. Through the adoption of next generation networks, such as the Information Centric Networking, it would be possible to overcome the QoS problems that nowadays are experienced. By adopting Blockchain technologies, in several use cases, it would be possible to improve those security aspects related to the non-temperability of information and privacy. I started this thesis analyzing next generation architectures enabling real time multimedia communications. In Software Defined Networking, Named Data Networking and Community Information Centric Networking, I highlighted potential approaches to solve QoS problems that are affecting real time multimedia applications. During my experiments I found that applications able to transmit high quality videos, such as 4k or 8k videos, or to directly interact with devices AR/VR enabled are missing for both ICN approaches. Then I proposed a REST interface for the enforcing of a specific QoS parameter, the round trip time (RTT) taking into consideration the specific use case of a game company that connects with the same telecommunication company of the final user. Supposing that the proposed REST APIs have been deployed in the game company and in the ISP, when one or more users are experiencing lag, the game company will try to ask the ISP to reduce the RTT for that specific user or that group of users. This request can be done by performing a call to a method where IP address(es) and the maximum RTT desired are passed. I also proposed other methods, through which it would be possible to retrieve information about the QoS parameters, and exchange, if necessary, an exceeding parameter in change of another one. The proposed REST APIs can also be used in more complex scenarios, where ISPs along the path are chained together, in order to improve the end to end QoS among Over The Top service provider and final users. To store the information exchanged by using the proposed REST APIs, I proposed to adopt a permissioned blockchain, analizying the ISPs cooperative use case with Hyperledger Fabric, where I proposed the adoption of the Proof of Authority consensus algorithm, to increase the throughput in terms of transactions per second. In a specific case that I examined, I am proposing a combination of Information Centric Networking and Blockchain, in an architecture where ISPs are exchanging valuable information regarding final Users, to improve their QoS parameters. I also proposed my smart contract for the gaming delay use case, that can be used to rule the communication among those ISPs that are along the path among OTT and final users. An extension of this work can be done, by defining billing costs for the QoS improvements

Providing guaranteed QoS in the hose-modeled VPN

With the development of the Internet, Internet service providers (ISPs) are required to offer revenue-generating and value-added services instead of only providing bandwidth and access services. Virtual Private Network (VPN) is one of the most important value-added services for ISPs. The classical VPN service is provided by implementing layer 2 technologies, either Frame Relay (FR) or Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM). With FR or ATM, virtual circuits are created before data delivery. Since the bandwidth and buffers are reserved, the QoS requirements can be naturally guaranteed. In the past few years, layer 3 VPN technologies are widely deployed due to the desirable performance in terms of flexibility, scalability and simplicity. Layer 3 VPNs are built upon IP tunnels, e.g., by using PPTP, L2TP or IPSec. Since IP is best-of-effort in nature, the QoS requirement cannot be guaranteed in layer 3 VPNs. Actually, layer 3 VPN service can only provide secure connectivity, i.e., protecting and authenticating IP packets between gateways or hosts in a VPN. Without doubt, with more applications on voice, audio and video being used in the Internet, the provision of QoS is one of the most important parts of the emerging services provided by ISPs. An intriguing question is: Is it possible to obtain the best of both layer 2 and 3 VPN? Is it possible to provide guaranteed or predictable QoS, as in layer 2 VPNs, while maintaining the flexibility and simplicity in layer 3 VPN? This question is the starting point of this study. The recently proposed hose model for VPN possesses desirable properties in terms of flexibility, scalability and multiplexing gain. However, the classic fair bandwidth allocation schemes and weighted fair queuing schemes raise the issue of low overall utilization in this model. A new fluid model for provider-provisioned virtual private network (PPVPN) is proposed in this dissertation. Based on the proposed model, an idealized fluid bandwidth allocation scheme is developed. This scheme is proven, analytically, to have the following properties: 1) maximize the overall throughput of the VPN without compromising fairness; 2) provide a mechanism that enables the VPN customers to allocate the bandwidth according to their requirements by assigning different weights to different hose flows, and thus obtain the predictable QoS performance; and 3) improve the overall throughput of the ISPs\u27 network. To approximate the idealized fluid scheme in the real world, the 2-dimensional deficit round robin (2-D DRR and 2-D DRR+) schemes are proposed. The integration of the proposed schemes with the best-effort traffic within the framework of virtual-router-based VPN is also investigated. The 2-D DRR and 2-D DER-+ schemes can be extended to multi-dimensional schemes to be employed in those applications which require a hierarchical scheduling architecture. To enhance the scalability, a more scalable non-per-flow-based scheme for output queued switches is developed as well, and the integration of this scheme within the framework of the MPLS VPN and applications for multicasting traffics is discussed. The performance and properties of these schemes are analyzed

Survey of Transportation of Adaptive Multimedia Streaming service in Internet

[DE] World Wide Web is the greatest boon towards the technological advancement of modern era. Using the benefits of Internet globally, anywhere and anytime, users can avail the benefits of accessing live and on demand video services. The streaming media systems such as YouTube, Netflix, and Apple Music are reining the multimedia world with frequent popularity among users. A key concern of quality perceived for video streaming applications over Internet is the Quality of Experience (QoE) that users go through. Due to changing network conditions, bit rate and initial delay and the multimedia file freezes or provide poor video quality to the end users, researchers across industry and academia are explored HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS), which split the video content into multiple segments and offer the clients at varying qualities. The video player at the client side plays a vital role in buffer management and choosing the appropriate bit rate for each such segment of video to be transmitted. A higher bit rate transmitted video pauses in between whereas, a lower bit rate video lacks in quality, requiring a tradeoff between them. The need of the hour was to adaptively varying the bit rate and video quality to match the transmission media conditions. Further, The main aim of this paper is to give an overview on the state of the art HAS techniques across multimedia and networking domains. A detailed survey was conducted to analyze challenges and solutions in adaptive streaming algorithms, QoE, network protocols, buffering and etc. It also focuses on various challenges on QoE influence factors in a fluctuating network condition, which are often ignored in present HAS methodologies. Furthermore, this survey will enable network and multimedia researchers a fair amount of understanding about the latest happenings of adaptive streaming and the necessary improvements that can be incorporated in future developments.Abdullah, MTA.; Lloret, J.; Canovas Solbes, A.; García-García, L. (2017). Survey of Transportation of Adaptive Multimedia Streaming service in Internet. Network Protocols and Algorithms. 9(1-2):85-125. doi:10.5296/npa.v9i1-2.12412S8512591-

Enabling multicast slices in edge networks

Telecommunication networks are undergoing a disruptive transition towards distributed mobile edge networks with virtualized network functions (VNFs) (e.g., firewalls, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs), and transcoders) within the proximity of users. This transition will enable network services, especially IoT applications, to be provisioned as network slices with sequences of VNFs, in order to guarantee the performance and security of their continuous data and control flows. In this paper we study the problems of delay-aware network slicing for multicasting traffic of IoT applications in edge networks. We first propose exact solutions by formulating the problems into Integer Linear Programs (ILPs). We further devise an approximation algorithm with an approximation ratio for the problem of delay-aware network slicing for a single multicast slice, with the objective to minimize the implementation cost of the network slice subject to its delay requirement constraint. Given multiple multicast slicing requests, we also propose an efficient heuristic that admits as many user requests as possible, through exploring the impact of a non-trivial interplay of the total computing resource demand and delay requirements. We then investigate the problem of delay-oriented network slicing with given levels of delay guarantees, considering that different types of IoT applications have different levels of delay requirements, for which we propose an efficient heuristic based on Reinforcement Learning (RL). We finally evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms through both simulations and implementations in a real test-bed. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms is promising

Design of Overlay Networks for Internet Multicast - Doctoral Dissertation, August 2002

Multicast is an efficient transmission scheme for supporting group communication in networks. Contrasted with unicast, where multiple point-to-point connections must be used to support communications among a group of users, multicast is more efficient because each data packet is replicated in the network – at the branching points leading to distinguished destinations, thus reducing the transmission load on the data sources and traffic load on the network links. To implement multicast, networks need to incorporate new routing and forwarding mechanisms in addition to the existing are not adequately supported in the current networks. The IP multicast are not adequately supported in the current networks. The IP multicast solution has serious scaling and deployment limitations, and cannot be easily extended to provide more enhanced data services. Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, IP multicast has ignored the economic nature of the problem, lacking incentives for service providers to deploy the service in wide area networks. Overlay multicast holds promise for the realization of large scale Internet multicast services. An overlay network is a virtual topology constructed on top of the Internet infrastructure. The concept of overlay networks enables multicast to be deployed as a service network rather than a network primitive mechanism, allowing deployment over heterogeneous networks without the need of universal network support. This dissertation addresses the network design aspects of overlay networks to provide scalable multicast services in the Internet. The resources and the network cost in the context of overlay networks are different from that in conventional networks, presenting new challenges and new problems to solve. Our design goal are the maximization of network utility and improved service quality. As the overall network design problem is extremely complex, we divide the problem into three components: the efficient management of session traffic (multicast routing), the provisioning of overlay network resources (bandwidth dimensioning) and overlay topology optimization (service placement). The combined solution provides a comprehensive procedure for planning and managing an overlay multicast network. We also consider a complementary form of overlay multicast called application-level multicast (ALMI). ALMI allows end systems to directly create an overlay multicast session among themselves. This gives applications the flexibility to communicate without relying on service provides. The tradeoff is that users do not have direct control on the topology and data paths taken by the session flows and will typically get lower quality of service due to the best effort nature of the Internet environment. ALMI is therefore suitable for sessions of small size or sessions where all members are well connected to the network. Furthermore, the ALMI framework allows us to experiment with application specific components such as data reliability, in order to identify a useful set of communication semantic for enhanced data services

SDN/NFV-enabled satellite communications networks: opportunities, scenarios and challenges

In the context of next generation 5G networks, the satellite industry is clearly committed to revisit and revamp the role of satellite communications. As major drivers in the evolution of (terrestrial) fixed and mobile networks, Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) technologies are also being positioned as central technology enablers towards improved and more flexible integration of satellite and terrestrial segments, providing satellite network further service innovation and business agility by advanced network resources management techniques. Through the analysis of scenarios and use cases, this paper provides a description of the benefits that SDN/NFV technologies can bring into satellite communications towards 5G. Three scenarios are presented and analysed to delineate different potential improvement areas pursued through the introduction of SDN/NFV technologies in the satellite ground segment domain. Within each scenario, a number of use cases are developed to gain further insight into specific capabilities and to identify the technical challenges stemming from them.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft