Greedy routing and virtual coordinates for future networks

At the core of the Internet, routers are continuously struggling with ever-growing routing and forwarding tables. Although hardware advances do accommodate such a growth, we anticipate new requirements e.g. in data-oriented networking where each content piece has to be referenced instead of hosts, such that current approaches relying on global information will not be viable anymore, no matter the hardware progress. In this thesis, we investigate greedy routing methods that can achieve similar routing performance as today but use much less resources and which rely on local information only. To this end, we add specially crafted name spaces to the network in which virtual coordinates represent the addressable entities. Our scheme enables participating routers to make forwarding decisions using only neighbourhood information, as the overarching pseudo-geometric name space structure already organizes and incorporates "vicinity" at a global level. A first challenge to the application of greedy routing on virtual coordinates to future networks is that of "routing dead-ends" that are local minima due to the difficulty of consistent coordinates attribution. In this context, we propose a routing recovery scheme based on a multi-resolution embedding of the network in low-dimensional Euclidean spaces. The recovery is performed by routing greedily on a blurrier view of the network. The different network detail-levels are obtained though the embedding of clustering-levels of the graph. When compared with higher-dimensional embeddings of a given network, our method shows a significant diminution of routing failures for similar header and control-state sizes. A second challenge to the application of virtual coordinates and greedy routing to future networks is the support of "customer-provider" as well as "peering" relationships between participants, resulting in a differentiated services environment. Although an application of greedy routing within such a setting would combine two very common fields of today's networking literature, such a scenario has, surprisingly, not been studied so far. In this context we propose two approaches to address this scenario. In a first approach we implement a path-vector protocol similar to that of BGP on top of a greedy embedding of the network. This allows each node to build a spatial map associated with each of its neighbours indicating the accessible regions. Routing is then performed through the use of a decision-tree classifier taking the destination coordinates as input. When applied on a real-world dataset (the CAIDA 2004 AS graph) we demonstrate an up to 40% compression ratio of the routing control information at the network's core as well as a computationally efficient decision process comparable to methods such as binary trees and tries. In a second approach, we take inspiration from consensus-finding in social sciences and transform the three-dimensional distance data structure (where the third dimension encodes the service differentiation) into a two-dimensional matrix on which classical embedding tools can be used. This transformation is achieved by agreeing on a set of constraints on the inter-node distances guaranteeing an administratively-correct greedy routing. The computed distances are also enhanced to encode multipath support. We demonstrate a good greedy routing performance as well as an above 90% satisfaction of multipath constraints when relying on the non-embedded obtained distances on synthetic datasets. As various embeddings of the consensus distances do not fully exploit their multipath potential, the use of compression techniques such as transform coding to approximate the obtained distance allows for better routing performances

Multipath inter-domain policy routing

Dissertação submetida para a obtenção do grau de Doutor em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de ComputadoresRouting can be abstracted to be a path nding problem in a graph that models the network. The problem can be modelled using an algebraic approach that describes the way routes are calculated and ranked. The shortest path problem is the most common form and consists in nding the path with the smallest cost. The inter-domain scenario introduces some new challenges to the routing problem: the routing is performed between independently con gured and managed networks; the ranking of the paths is not based on measurable metrics but on policies; and the forwarding is destination based hop-by-hop. In this thesis we departed from the Border gateway Protocol (BGP) identifying its main problems and elaborating on some ideal characteristics for a routing protocol suited for the inter-domain reality. The main areas and contributions of this work are the following: The current state of the art in algebraic modeling of routing problems is used to provide a list of possible alternative conditions for the correct operation of such protocols. For each condition the consequences in terms of optimality and network restrictions are presented. A routing architecture for the inter-domain scenario is presented. It is proven that it achieves a multipath routing solution in nite time without causing forwarding loops. We discuss its advantages and weaknesses. A tra c-engineering scheme is designed to take advantage of the proposed architecture. It works using only local information and cooperation of remote ASes to minimize congestion in the network with minimal signalling. Finally a general model of a routing protocol based on hierarchical policies is used to study how e cient is the protocol operation when the correctness conditions are met. This results in some conclusions on how the policies should be chosen and applied in order to achieve speci c goals.Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation -(FCT/MCTES)grant SFRH/BD/44476/2008; CTS multi-annual funding project PEst OE/EEI/UI0066/2011; MPSat project PTDC/EEA TEL/099074/2008; OPPORTUNISTICCR project PTDC/EEA-TEL/115981/2009; Fentocells project PTDC/EEA TEL/120666/201

GUARDIANS final report

Emergencies in industrial warehouses are a major concern for firefghters. The large dimensions together with the development of dense smoke that drastically reduces visibility, represent major challenges. The Guardians robot swarm is designed to assist fire fighters in searching a large warehouse. In this report we discuss the technology developed for a swarm of robots searching and assisting fire fighters. We explain the swarming algorithms which provide the functionality by which the robots react to and follow humans while no communication is required. Next we discuss the wireless communication system, which is a so-called mobile ad-hoc network. The communication network provides also one of the means to locate the robots and humans. Thus the robot swarm is able to locate itself and provide guidance information to the humans. Together with the re ghters we explored how the robot swarm should feed information back to the human fire fighter. We have designed and experimented with interfaces for presenting swarm based information to human beings

Software-based and regionally-oriented traffic management in Networks-on-Chip

Since the introduction of chip-multiprocessor systems, the number of integrated cores has been steady growing and workload applications have been adapted to exploit the increasing parallelism. This changed the importance of efficient on-chip communication significantly and the infrastructure has to keep step with these new requirements. The work at hand makes significant contributions to the state-of-the-art of the latest generation of such solutions, called Networks-on-Chip, to improve the performance, reliability, and flexible management of these on-chip infrastructures

Configurable data center switch architectures

In this thesis, we explore alternative architectures for implementing con_gurable Data Center Switches along with the advantages that can be provided by such switches. Our first contribution centers around determining switch architectures that can be implemented on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) to provide configurable switching protocols. In the process, we identify a gap in the availability of frameworks to realistically evaluate the performance of switch architectures in data centers and contribute a simulation framework that relies on realistic data center traffic patterns. Our framework is then used to evaluate the performance of currently existing as well as newly proposed FPGA-amenable switch designs. Through collaborative work with Meng and Papaphilippou, we establish that only small-medium range switches can be implemented on today's FPGAs. Our second contribution is a novel switch architecture that integrates a custom in-network hardware accelerator with a generic switch to accelerate Deep Neural Network training applications in data centers. Our proposed accelerator architecture is prototyped on an FPGA, and a scalability study is conducted to demonstrate the trade-offs of an FPGA implementation when compared to an ASIC implementation. In addition to the hardware prototype, we contribute a light weight load-balancing and congestion control protocol that leverages the unique communication patterns of ML data-parallel jobs to enable fair sharing of network resources across different jobs. Our large-scale simulations demonstrate the ability of our novel switch architecture and light weight congestion control protocol to both accelerate the training time of machine learning jobs by up to 1.34x and benefit other latency-sensitive applications by reducing their 99%-tile completion time by up to 4.5x. As for our final contribution, we identify the main requirements of in-network applications and propose a Network-on-Chip (NoC)-based architecture for supporting a heterogeneous set of applications. Observing the lack of tools to support such research, we provide a tool that can be used to evaluate NoC-based switch architectures.Open Acces

GUARDIANS final report part 1 (draft): a robot swarm assisting a human fire fighter

Emergencies in industrial warehouses are a major concern for fire fighters. The large dimensions together with the development of dense smoke that drastically reduces visibility, represent major challenges. The Guardians robot swarm is designed to assist re ghters in searching a large warehouse. In this paper we discuss the technology developed for a swarm of robots assisting re ghters. We explain the swarming algorithms which provide the functionality by which the robots react to and follow humans while no communication is required. Next we discuss the wireless communication system, which is a so-called mobile ad-hoc network. The communication network provides also the means to locate the robots and humans. Thus the robot swarm is able to provide guidance information to the humans. Together with the fire fighters we explored how the robot swarm should feed information back to the human fire fighter. We have designed and experimented with interfaces for presenting swarm based information to human beings

Scale-free networks and scalable interdomain routing

Trabalho apresentado no âmbito do Mestrado em Engenharia Informática, como requisito parcial para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia InformáticaThe exponential growth of the Internet, due to its tremendous success, has brought to light some limitations of the current design at the routing and arquitectural level, such as scalability and convergence as well as the lack of support for traffic engineering, mobility, route differentiation and security. Some of these issues arise from the design of the current architecture, while others are caused by the interdomain routing scheme - BGP. Since it would be quite difficult to add support for the aforementioned issues, both in the interdomain architecture and in the in the routing scheme, various researchers believe that a solution can only achieved via a new architecture and (possibly) a new routing scheme. A new routing strategy has emerged from the studies regarding large-scale networks, which is suitable for a special type of large-scale networks which characteristics are independent of network size: scale-free networks. Using the greedy routing strategy a node routes a message to a given destination using only the information regarding the destination and its neighbours, choosing the one which is closest to the destination. This routing strategy ensures the following remarkable properties: routing state in the order of the number of neighbours; no requirements on nodes to exchange messages in order to perform routing; chosen paths are the shortest ones. This dissertation aims at: studying the aforementioned problems, studying the Internet configuration as a scale-free network, and defining a preliminary path onto the definition of a greedy routing scheme for interdomain routing

Measuring Effectiveness of Address Schemes for AS-level Graphs

This dissertation presents measures of efficiency and locality for Internet addressing schemes. Historically speaking, many issues, faced by the Internet, have been solved just in time, to make the Internet just work~\cite{justWork}. Consensus, however, has been reached that today\u27s Internet routing and addressing system is facing serious scaling problems: multi-homing which causes finer granularity of routing policies and finer control to realize various traffic engineering requirements, an increased demand for provider-independent prefix allocations which injects unaggregatable prefixes into the Default Free Zone (DFZ) routing table, and ever-increasing Internet user population and mobile edge devices. As a result, the DFZ routing table is again growing at an exponential rate. Hierarchical, topology-based addressing has long been considered crucial to routing and forwarding scalability. Recently, however, a number of research efforts are considering alternatives to this traditional approach. With the goal of informing such research, we investigated the efficiency of address assignment in the existing (IPv4) Internet. In particular, we ask the question: ``how can we measure the locality of an address scheme given an input AS-level graph?\u27\u27 To do so, we first define a notion of efficiency or locality based on the average number of bit-hops required to advertize all prefixes in the Internet. In order to quantify how far from ``optimal the current Internet is, we assign prefixes to ASes ``from scratch in a manner that preserves observed semantics, using three increasingly strict definitions of equivalence. Next we propose another metric that in some sense quantifies the ``efficiency of the labeling and is independent of forwarding/routing mechanisms. We validate the effectiveness of the metric by applying it to a series of address schemes with increasing randomness given an input AS-level graph. After that we apply the metric to the current Internet address scheme across years and compare the results with those of compact routing schemes