90 research outputs found

    Foutbestendige toekomstige internetarchitecturen

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    Carrier grade resilience in geographically distributed software defined networks

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    The Internet is a fundamental infrastructure in modern life, supporting many different communication services. One of the most critical properties of the Internet is its ability to recover from failures, such as link or equipment failure. The goal of network resilience heavily influenced the design of the Internet, leading to the use of distributed routing protocols. While distributed algorithms largely solve the issue of network resilience, other concerns remain. A significant concern is network management, as it is a complex and error-prone process. In addition, network control logic is tightly integrated into the forwarding devices, making it difficult to upgrade the logic to introduce new features. Finally, the lack of a common control platform requires new network functions to provide their own solutions to common, but challenging, issues related to operating in a distributed environment. A new network architecture, software-defined networking (SDN), aims to alleviate many of these network challenges by introducing useful abstractions into the control plane. In an SDN architecture, control functions are implemented as network applications, and run in a logically centralized network operating system (NOS). The NOS provides the applications with abstractions for common functions, such as network discovery, installation of forwarding behaviour, and state distribution. Network management can be handled programmatically instead of manually, and new features can be introduced by simply updating or adding a control application in the NOS. Given proper design, an SDN architecture could improve the performance of reactive approaches to restoring traffic after a network failure. However, it has been shown in this dissertation that a reactive approach to traffic restoration will not meet the requirements of carrier grade networks, which require that traffic is redirected onto a back-up route less than 50 ms after the failure is detected. To achieve 50 ms recovery, a proactive approach must be used, where back-up rules are calculated and installed before a failure occurs. Several different protocols implement this proactive approach in traditional networks, and some work has also been done in the SDN space. However, current SDN solutions for fast recovery are not necessarily suitable for a carrier grade environment. This dissertation proposes a new failure recovery strategy for SDN, based on existing protocols used in traditional carrier grade networks. The use of segment routing allows for back-up routes to be encoded into the packet header when a failure occurs, without needing to inform other switches of the failure. Back-up routes follow the post-convergence path, meaning that they will not violate traffic engineering constraints on the network. An MPLS (multiprotocol label switching) data plane is used to ensure compatibility with current carrier networks, as MPLS is currently a common protocol in carrier networks. The proposed solution was implemented as a network application, on top of an open-source network operating system. A geographically distributed network testbed was used to verify the suitability for a geographically distributed carrier network. Proof of concept tests showed that the proposed solution provides complete protection for any single link, link aggregate or node failure in the network. In addition, communication latencies in the network do not influence the restoration time, as they do in reactive approaches. Finally, analysis of the back-up path metrics, such as back-up path lengths and number of labels required, showed that the application installed efficient back-up paths

    Resilient routing in the internet

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    Although it is widely known that the Internet is not prone to random failures, unplanned failures due to attacks can be very damaging. This prevents many organisations from deploying beneficial operations through the Internet. In general, the data is delivered from a source to a destination via a series of routers (i.e routing path). These routers employ routing protocols to compute best paths based on routing information they possess. However, when a failure occurs, the routers must re-construct their routing tables, which may take several seconds to complete. Evidently, most losses occur during this period. IP Fast Re-Route (IPFRR), Multi-Topology (MT) routing, and overlays are examples of solutions proposed to handle network failures. These techniques alleviate the packet losses to different extents, yet none have provided optimal solutions. This thesis focuses on identifying the fundamental routing problem due to convergence process. It describes the mechanisms of each existing technique as well as its pros and cons. Furthermore, it presents new techniques for fast re-routing as follows. Enhanced Loop-Free Alternates (E-LFAs) increase the repair coverage of the existing techniques, Loop-Free Alternates (LFAs). In addition, two techniques namely, Full Fast Failure Recovery (F3R) and fast re-route using Alternate Next Hop Counters (ANHC), offer full protection against any single link failures. Nevertheless, the former technique requires significantly higher computational overheads and incurs longer backup routes. Both techniques are proved to be complete and correct while ANHC neither requires any major modifications to the traditional routing paradigm nor incurs significant overheads. Furthermore, in the presence of failures, ANHC does not jeopardise other operable parts of the network. As emerging applications require higher reliability, multiple failures scenarios cannot be ignored. Most existing fast re-route techniques are able to handle only single or dual failures cases. This thesis provides an insight on a novel approach known as Packet Re-cycling (PR), which is capable of handling any number of failures in an oriented network. That is, packets can be forwarded successfully as long as a path between a source and a destination is available. Since the Internet-based services and applications continue to advance, improving the network resilience will be a challenging research topic for the decades to come

    Resilient and Scalable Forwarding for Software-Defined Networks with P4-Programmable Switches

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    Traditional networking devices support only fixed features and limited configurability. Network softwarization leverages programmable software and hardware platforms to remove those limitations. In this context the concept of programmable data planes allows directly to program the packet processing pipeline of networking devices and create custom control plane algorithms. This flexibility enables the design of novel networking mechanisms where the status quo struggles to meet high demands of next-generation networks like 5G, Internet of Things, cloud computing, and industry 4.0. P4 is the most popular technology to implement programmable data planes. However, programmable data planes, and in particular, the P4 technology, emerged only recently. Thus, P4 support for some well-established networking concepts is still lacking and several issues remain unsolved due to the different characteristics of programmable data planes in comparison to traditional networking. The research of this thesis focuses on two open issues of programmable data planes. First, it develops resilient and efficient forwarding mechanisms for the P4 data plane as there are no satisfying state of the art best practices yet. Second, it enables BIER in high-performance P4 data planes. BIER is a novel, scalable, and efficient transport mechanism for IP multicast traffic which has only very limited support of high-performance forwarding platforms yet. The main results of this thesis are published as 8 peer-reviewed and one post-publication peer-reviewed publication. The results cover the development of suitable resilience mechanisms for P4 data planes, the development and implementation of resilient BIER forwarding in P4, and the extensive evaluations of all developed and implemented mechanisms. Furthermore, the results contain a comprehensive P4 literature study. Two more peer-reviewed papers contain additional content that is not directly related to the main results. They implement congestion avoidance mechanisms in P4 and develop a scheduling concept to find cost-optimized load schedules based on day-ahead forecasts

    Using GRASP and GA to design resilient and cost-effective IP/MPLS networks

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    The main objective of this thesis is to find good quality solutions for representative instances of the problem of designing a resilient and low cost IP/MPLS network, to be deployed over an existing optical transport network. This research is motivated by two complementary real-world application cases, which comprise the most important commercial and academic networks of Uruguay. To achieve this goal, we performed an exhaustive analysis of existing models and technologies. From all of them we took elements that were contrasted with the particular requirements of our counterparts. We highlight among these requirements, the need of getting solutions transparently implementable over a heterogeneous network environment, which limit us to use widely standardized features of related technologies. We decided to create new models more suitable to fit these needs. These models are intrinsically hard to solve (NP-Hard). Thus we developed metaheuristic based algorithms to find solutions to these real-world instances. Evolutionary Algorithms and Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedures obtained the best results. As it usually happens, real-world planning problems are surrounded by uncertainty. Therefore, we have worked closely with our counterparts to reduce the fuzziness upon data to a set of representative cases. They were combined with different strategies of design to get to scenarios, which were translated into instances of these problems. Finally, the algorithms were fed with this information, and from their outcome we derived our results and conclusions

    Smart Sensor Technologies for IoT

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    The recent development in wireless networks and devices has led to novel services that will utilize wireless communication on a new level. Much effort and resources have been dedicated to establishing new communication networks that will support machine-to-machine communication and the Internet of Things (IoT). In these systems, various smart and sensory devices are deployed and connected, enabling large amounts of data to be streamed. Smart services represent new trends in mobile services, i.e., a completely new spectrum of context-aware, personalized, and intelligent services and applications. A variety of existing services utilize information about the position of the user or mobile device. The position of mobile devices is often achieved using the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) chips that are integrated into all modern mobile devices (smartphones). However, GNSS is not always a reliable source of position estimates due to multipath propagation and signal blockage. Moreover, integrating GNSS chips into all devices might have a negative impact on the battery life of future IoT applications. Therefore, alternative solutions to position estimation should be investigated and implemented in IoT applications. This Special Issue, “Smart Sensor Technologies for IoT” aims to report on some of the recent research efforts on this increasingly important topic. The twelve accepted papers in this issue cover various aspects of Smart Sensor Technologies for IoT

    Fast network recovery

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    The Internet is increasingly used to transport time-critical traffic. Applications like video conferencing, television, telephony and distributed games have strict requirements to the delay and availability offered by the underlying network. At the same time, connectivity failures caused by failures in network equipment is a part of everyday operation in large communication systems. The traditional recovery mechanisms used in IP networks are not designed with real-time applications in mind. The distributed nature of popular intradomain routing protocols allows them to eventually recover from any number of failures that leaves the network connected, but this isa time consuming process that can lead to unacceptable performance degradations for some applications. In this work, we argue that there is a need for fast recovery mechanisms that allow packet forwarding to continue over alternate paths immediately after a failure, before the routing protocol has converged on the altered topology. To give rapid response, such mechanisms should be proactive in the sense that an alternate route is readily available when a failure is discovered, and local, so that the recovery action can be effected by the node that discovers the failure. Further, care should be taken so that the shifting of recovered traffic to an alternate route does not lead to congestion and packet loss in other parts of the network. We present and investigate mechanisms that can respond quickly to failures or unexpected traffic shifts in the network. First, we evaluate the recovery strategy used in a network protocol called Resilient Packet Ring (RPR). The ring topology used in RPR allows the implementation of very fast protection mechanisms. We look at the performance of these mechanisms, and propose improvements that reduce packet loss and shorten the experienced disruption time after a link or node failure. Then, in the main part of this work, we focus on fast recovery in general mesh networks. We present Resilient Routing Layers (RRL) and Multiple Routing Configurations (MRC), which are methods for near-instantaneous recovery from component failures in packet networks. We discuss and evaluate our mechanisms with respect to state requirements and distribution of the recovered traffic. For MRC, we move on to present methods for reducing the chances of congestion after a recovery operation. We show that if we have knowledge about the traffic demands, we can use this information to create MRC recovery paths that avoid the most heavily used parts of the network. Finally, we show how the concepts used in RRL and MRC to give recovery from component failures also can be used to avoid congestion when there are sudden shifts in the traffic distribution. Our method is more flexible than traditional traffic engineering methods used in connectionless IP networks, since it does not involve changing link weights to respond to a changed traffic situation. Fast recovery mechanisms like those proposed in this work can help improve the stability and availability of IP networks. This is an important requirement for enabling new and existing real-time applications over general-purpose Internet infrastructure

    Improving resource management in multi-protocol label switched traffic engineered networks

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    Over the years, the Internet has emerged as an indispensable platform for information exchange. As availability increases, development of new applications generate enormous volumes of tra c. Such growth continually taxes service provider resources. A common and e ective resource management option deployed by several service providers is Multi-Protocol Label Switched (MPLS) based Tra c Engineering (TE).This dissertation proposes new MPLS based TE mechanisms capable of dealing with tra c changes, such as growth and shifts. Speci cally, new techniques for dynamic bandwidth allocation and routing are proposed and developed through simulations under failure and non-failure scenarios. Issues related to inter-domain deployment are also studied and nally, an experimental testbed setup is proposed and implemented for realistic small scale testing.A new tra c engineering technique involving the coupling of dynamic bandwidth allocation with rerouting to nd the best path for the current tra c is proposed. Realistic topologies and tra c pro les are used for detailed analysis and comparisons with existing techniques. Performance analysis is also undertaken in an International network scenario carrying a mix of voice and data tra c across several timezones. Several key issues are highlighted after studying underlying network dynamics such as signaling overhead, router load, tra c path quality, etc. Keeping these issues in mind, a new trend-based bandwidth reservation mechanism is proposed. The problem of inter-domain TE is analyzed next. Existing inter-domain path computation approaches, signaling and path setup issues are studied, quanti ed and compared. Lastly, the functional prototype of a testbed architecture consisting of Cisco routers and Linux boxes is presented. A new Java based API that has been developed to con gure the testbed and deploy new mechanisms is also discussed.Ph.D., Computer Engineering -- Drexel University, 200
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