Data Movement Challenges and Solutions with Software Defined Networking

With the recent rise in cloud computing, applications are routinely accessing and interacting with data on remote resources. Interaction with such remote resources for the operation of media-rich applications in mobile environments is also on the rise. As a result, the performance of the underlying network infrastructure can have a significant impact on the quality of service experienced by the user. Despite receiving significant attention from both academia and industry, computer networks still face a number of challenges. Users oftentimes report and complain about poor experiences with their devices and applications, which can oftentimes be attributed to network performance when downloading or uploading application data. This dissertation investigates problems that arise with data movement across computer networks and proposes novel solutions to address these issues through software defined networking (SDN). SDN is lauded to be the paradigm of choice for next generation networks. While academia explores use cases in various contexts, industry has focused on data center and wide area networks. There is a significant range of complex and application-specific network services that can potentially benefit from SDN, but introduction and adoption of such solutions remains slow in production networks. One impeding factor is the lack of a simple yet expressive enough framework applicable to all SDN services across production network domains. Without a uniform framework, SDN developers create disjoint solutions, resulting in untenable management and maintenance overhead. The SDN-based solutions developed in this dissertation make use of a common agent-based approach. The architecture facilitates application-oriented SDN design with an abstraction composed of software agents on top of the underlying network. There are three key components modern and future networks require to deliver exceptional data transfer performance to the end user: (1) user and application mobility, (2) high throughput data transfer, and (3) efficient and scalable content distribution. Meeting these key components will not only ensure the network can provide robust and reliable end-to-end connectivity, but also that network resources will be used efficiently. First, mobility support is critical for user applications to maintain connectivity to remote, cloud-based resources. Today\u27s network users are frequently accessing such resources while on the go, transitioning from network to network with the expectation that their applications will continue to operate seamlessly. As users perform handovers between heterogeneous networks or between networks across administrative domains, the application becomes responsible for maintaining or establishing new connections to remote resources. Although application developers often account for such handovers, the result is oftentimes visible to the user through diminished quality of service (e.g. rebuffering in video streaming applications). Many intra-domain handover solutions exist for handovers in WiFi and cellular networks, such as mobile IP, but they are architecturally complex and have not been integrated to form a scalable, inter-domain solution. A scalable framework is proposed that leverages SDN features to implement both horizontal and vertical handovers for heterogeneous wireless networks within and across administrative domains. User devices can select an appropriate network using an on-board virtual SDN implementation that manages available network interfaces. An SDN-based counterpart operates in the network core and edge to handle user migrations as they transition from one edge attachment point to another. The framework was developed and deployed as an extension to the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) testbed; however, the framework can be deployed on any OpenFlow enabled network. Evaluation revealed users can maintain existing application connections without breaking the sockets and requiring the application to recover. Second, high throughput data transfer is essential for user applications to acquire large remote data sets. As data sizes become increasingly large, often combined with their locations being far from the applications, the well known impact of lower Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) throughput over large delay-bandwidth product paths becomes more significant to these applications. While myriads of solutions exist to alleviate the problem, they require specialized software and/or network stacks at both the application host and the remote data server, making it hard to scale up to a large range of applications and execution environments. This results in high throughput data transfer that is available to only a select subset of network users who have access to such specialized software. An SDN based solution called Steroid OpenFlow Service (SOS) has been proposed as a network service that transparently increases the throughput of TCP-based data transfers across large networks. SOS shifts the complexity of high performance data transfer from the end user to the network; users do not need to configure anything on the client and server machines participating in the data transfer. The SOS architecture supports seamless high performance data transfer at scale for multiple users and for high bandwidth connections. Emphasis is placed on the use of SOS as a part of a larger, richer data transfer ecosystem, complementing and compounding the efforts of existing data transfer solutions. Non-TCP-based solutions, such as Aspera, can operate seamlessly alongside an SOS deployment, while those based on TCP, such as wget, curl, and GridFTP, can leverage SOS for throughput improvement beyond what a single TCP connection can provide. Through extensive evaluation in real-world environments, the SOS architecture is proven to be flexibly deployable on a variety of network architectures, from cloud-based, to production networks, to scaled up, high performance data center environments. Evaluation showed that the SOS architecture scales linearly through the addition of SOS “agents†to the SOS deployment, providing data transfer performance improvement to multiple users simultaneously. An individual data transfer enhanced by SOS was shown to have increased throughput nearly forty times the same data transfer without SOS assistance. Third, efficient and scalable video content distribution is imperative as the demand for multimedia content over the Internet increases. Current state of the art solutions consist of vast content distribution networks (CDNs) where content is oftentimes hosted in duplicate at various geographically distributed locations. Although CDNs are useful for the dissemination of static content, they do not provide a clear and scalable model for the on demand production and distribution of live, streaming content. IP multicast is a popular solution to scalable video content distribution; however, it is seldom used due to deployment and operational complexity. Inspired from the distributed design of todays CDNs and the distribution trees used by IP multicast, a SDN based framework called GENI Cinema (GC) is proposed to allow for the distribution of live video content at scale. GC allows for the efficient management and distribution of live video content at scale without the added architectural complexity and inefficiencies inherent to contemporary solutions such as IP multicast. GC has been deployed as an experimental, nation-wide live video distribution service using the GENI network, broadcasting live and prerecorded video streams from conferences for remote attendees, from the classroom for distance education, and for live sporting events. GC clients can easily and efficiently switch back and forth between video streams with improved switching latency latency over cable, satellite, and other live video providers. The real world dep loyments and evaluation of the proposed solutions show how SDN can be used as a novel way to solve current data transfer problems across computer networks. In addition, this dissertation is expected to provide guidance for designing, deploying, and debugging SDN-based applications across a variety of network topologies

IP and ATM - a position paper

This paper gives a technical overview of different networking technologies, such as the Internet, ATM. It describes different approaches of how to run IP on top of an ATM network, and assesses their potential to be used as an integrated services network

IP and ATM - current evolution for integrated services

Current and future applications make use of different technologies as voice, data, and video. Consequently network technologies need to support them. For many years, the ATM based Broadband-ISDN has generally been regarded as the ultimate networking technology, which can integrate voice, data, and video services. With the recent tremendous growth of the Internet and the reluctant deployment of public ATM networks, the future development of ATM seems to be less clear than it used to be. In the past IP provided (and was though to provide) only best effort services, thus, despite its world wide diffution, was not considered as a network solution for multimedia application. Currently many of the IETF working groups work on areas related to integrated services, and IP is also proposing itself as networking technology for supporting voice, data, and video services. This paper give a technical overview on the competing integrated services network solutions, such as IP, ATM and the different available and emerging technologies on how to run IP over ATM, and tries to identify their potential and shortcomings

OmniSwitch 7700/7800 OmniSwitch 8800 Network Configuration Guide

This configuration guide includes information about configuring the following features: • VLANs, VLAN router ports, mobile ports, and VLAN rules. • Basic Layer 2 functions, such as Ethernet port parameters, source learning, Spanning Tree, and Alcatel interswitch protocols (AMAP and GMAP). • Advanced Layer 2 functions, such as 802.1Q tagging, Link Aggregation, IP Multicast Switching, andServer Load Balancing. • Basic routing protocols and functions, such as static IP routes, RIP, DHCP Relay, Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP), and IPX. • Security features, such as switch access control, Authenticated VLANs (AVLANs), authentication servers, and policy management. • Quality of Service (QoS) and Access Control Lists (ACLs) features, such as policy rules for prioritizingand filtering traffic, remapping packet headers, and network address translation. • Diagnostic tools, such as RMON, port mirroring, and switch logging.This OmniSwitch 7700/7800/8800 Network Configuration Guide describes how to set up and monitor software features that will allow your switch to operate in a live network environment. The software features described in this manual are shipped standard with your OmniSwitch 7700, 7800, or 8800. These features are used when setting up your OmniSwitch in a network of switches and routers

A Covert Channel in Packet Switching Data Networks

This paper presents a covert communication channel that exists in virtually all forms of packet switching data networks. On the one hand, this covert channel, if used properly, can potentially enhance the overall security of data communications over networks. On the other hand, the covert channel can also potentially become a back door to access a destination computer, and hence becomes a security hazard to the computer. A simple protocol is specified for communications on the covert channel. A modified TFTP application is also presented to demonstrate how to use the covert channel to convey secret messages or to enhance the integrity of data communications. The application also illustrates a back door that leaks client’s data files without user notification. A sliding entropy method is also introduced to detect some cases of covert channels

A high speed fault-tolerant multimedia network and connectionless gateway for ATM networks.

by Patrick Lam Sze Fan.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1997.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 163-[170]).Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1Chapter 2 --- Fault-tolerant CUM LAUDE NET --- p.7Chapter 2.1 --- Overview of CUM LAUDE NET --- p.7Chapter 2.2 --- Network architecture of CUM LAUDE NET --- p.8Chapter 2.3 --- Design of Router-node --- p.10Chapter 2.3.1 --- Architecture of the Router-node --- p.10Chapter 2.3.2 --- Buffers Arrangement of the Router-node --- p.12Chapter 2.3.3 --- Buffer transmission policies --- p.13Chapter 2.4 --- Protocols of CUM LAUDE NET --- p.14Chapter 2.5 --- Frame Format of CUM LAUDE NET --- p.15Chapter 2.6 --- Fault-tolerant (FT) and Auto-healing (AH) algorithms --- p.16Chapter 2.6.1 --- Overview of the algorithms --- p.16Chapter 2.6.2 --- Network Failure Scenarios --- p.18Chapter 2.6.3 --- Design and Implementation of the Fault Tolerant Algorithm --- p.19Chapter 2.6.4 --- Design and Implementation of the Auto Healing Algorithm --- p.26Chapter 2.6.5 --- Network Management Signals and Restoration Times --- p.27Chapter 2.6.6 --- Comparison of fault-tolerance features of other networks with the CUM LAUDE NET --- p.31Chapter 2.7 --- Chapter Summary --- p.31Chapter 3 --- Overview of the Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) --- p.33Chapter 3.1 --- Introduction --- p.33Chapter 3.2 --- ATM Network Interfaces --- p.34Chapter 3.3 --- ATM Virtual Connections --- p.35Chapter 3.4 --- ATM Cell Format --- p.36Chapter 3.5 --- ATM Address Formats --- p.36Chapter 3.6 --- ATM Protocol Reference Model --- p.38Chapter 3.6.1 --- The ATM Layer --- p.39Chapter 3.6.2 --- The ATM Adaptation Layer --- p.39Chapter 3.7 --- ATM Signalling --- p.44Chapter 3.7.1 --- ATM Signalling Messages and Call Setup Procedures --- p.45Chapter 3.8 --- Interim Local Management Interface (ILMI) --- p.47Chapter 4 --- Issues of Connectionless Gateway --- p.49Chapter 4.1 --- Introduction --- p.49Chapter 4.2 --- The Issues --- p.50Chapter 4.3 --- ATM Internetworking --- p.51Chapter 4.3.1 --- LAN Emulation --- p.52Chapter 4.3.2 --- IP over ATM --- p.53Chapter 4.3.3 --- Comparing IP over ATM and LAN Emulation --- p.59Chapter 4.4 --- Connection Management --- p.61Chapter 4.4.1 --- The Indirect Approach --- p.62Chapter 4.4.2 --- The Direct Approach --- p.63Chapter 4.4.3 --- Comparing the two approaches --- p.64Chapter 4.5 --- Protocol Conversion --- p.65Chapter 4.5.1 --- Selection of Protocol Converter --- p.68Chapter 4.6 --- Packet Forwarding Modes --- p.68Chapter 4.7 --- Bandwidth Assignment --- p.70Chapter 4.7.1 --- Bandwidth Reservation --- p.71Chapter 4.7.2 --- Fast Bandwidth Reservation --- p.72Chapter 4.7.3 --- Bandwidth Advertising --- p.72Chapter 4.7.4 --- Bandwidth Advertising with Cell Drop Detection --- p.73Chapter 4.7.5 --- Bandwidth Allocation on Source Demand --- p.73Chapter 4.7.6 --- The Common Problems --- p.74Chapter 5 --- Design and Implementation of the Connectionless Gateway --- p.77Chapter 5.1 --- Introduction --- p.77Chapter 5.1.1 --- Functions Definition of Connectionless Gateway --- p.79Chapter 5.2 --- Hardware Architecture of the Connectionless Gateway --- p.79Chapter 5.2.1 --- Imposed Limitations --- p.82Chapter 5.3 --- Software Architecture of the Connectionless Gateway --- p.83Chapter 5.3.1 --- TCP/IP Internals --- p.84Chapter 5.3.2 --- ATM on Linux --- p.85Chapter 5.4 --- Network Architecture --- p.88Chapter 5.4.1 --- IP Addresses Assignment --- p.90Chapter 5.5 --- Internal Structure of Connectionless Gateway --- p.90Chapter 5.5.1 --- Protocol Stacks of the Gateway --- p.90Chapter 5.5.2 --- Gateway Operation by Example --- p.93Chapter 5.5.3 --- Routing Table Maintenance --- p.97Chapter 5.6 --- Additional Features --- p.105Chapter 5.6.1 --- Priority Output Queues System --- p.105Chapter 5.6.2 --- Gateway Performance Monitor --- p.112Chapter 5.7 --- Setup an Operational ATM LAN --- p.117Chapter 5.7.1 --- SVC Connections --- p.117Chapter 5.7.2 --- PVC Connections --- p.119Chapter 5.8 --- Application of the Connectionless Gateway --- p.120Chapter 6 --- Performance Measurement of the Connectionless Gateway --- p.121Chapter 6.1 --- Introduction --- p.121Chapter 6.2 --- Experimental Setup --- p.121Chapter 6.3 --- Measurement Tools of the Experiments --- p.123Chapter 6.4 --- Descriptions of the Experiments --- p.124Chapter 6.4.1 --- Log Files --- p.125Chapter 6.5 --- UDP Control Rate Test --- p.126Chapter 6.5.1 --- Results and analysis of the UDP Control Rate Test --- p.127Chapter 6.6 --- UDP Maximum Rate Test --- p.138Chapter 6.6.1 --- Results and analysis of the UDP Maximum Rate Test --- p.138Chapter 6.7 --- TCP Maximum Rate Test --- p.140Chapter 6.7.1 --- Results and analysis of the TCP Maximum Rate Test --- p.140Chapter 6.8 --- Request/Response Test --- p.144Chapter 6.8.1 --- Results and analysis of the Request/Response Test --- p.144Chapter 6.9 --- Priority Queue System Verification Test --- p.149Chapter 6.9.1 --- Results and analysis of the Priority Queue System Verifi- cation Test --- p.150Chapter 6.10 --- Other Observations --- p.153Chapter 6.11 --- Solutions to Improve the Performance --- p.154Chapter 6.12 --- Future Development --- p.157Chapter 7 --- Conclusion --- p.158Bibliography --- p.163A List of Publications --- p.17

Congestion Avoidance Testbed Experiments

DARTnet provides an excellent environment for executing networking experiments. Since the network is private and spans the continental United States, it gives researchers a great opportunity to test network behavior under controlled conditions. However, this opportunity is not available very often, and therefore a support environment for such testing is lacking. To help remedy this situation, part of SRI's effort in this project was devoted to advancing the state of the art in the techniques used for benchmarking network performance. The second objective of SRI's effort in this project was to advance networking technology in the area of traffic control, and to test our ideas on DARTnet, using the tools we developed to improve benchmarking networks. Networks are becoming more common and are being used by more and more people. The applications, such as multimedia conferencing and distributed simulations, are also placing greater demand on the resources the networks provide. Hence, new mechanisms for traffic control must be created to enable their networks to serve the needs of their users. SRI's objective, therefore, was to investigate a new queueing and scheduling approach that will help to meet the needs of a large, diverse user population in a "fair" way

IP and ATM integration: A New paradigm in multi-service internetworking

ATM is a widespread technology adopted by many to support advanced data communication, in particular efficient Internet services provision. The expected challenges of multimedia communication together with the increasing massive utilization of IP-based applications urgently require redesign of networking solutions in terms of both new functionalities and enhanced performance. However, the networking context is affected by so many changes, and to some extent chaotic growth, that any approach based on a structured and complex top-down architecture is unlikely to be applicable. Instead, an approach based on finding out the best match between realistic service requirements and the pragmatic, intelligent use of technical opportunities made available by the product market seems more appropriate. By following this approach, innovations and improvements can be introduced at different times, not necessarily complying with each other according to a coherent overall design. With the aim of pursuing feasible innovations in the different networking aspects, we look at both IP and ATM internetworking in order to investigating a few of the most crucial topics/ issues related to the IP and ATM integration perspective. This research would also address various means of internetworking the Internet Protocol (IP) and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) with an objective of identifying the best possible means of delivering Quality of Service (QoS) requirements for multi-service applications, exploiting the meritorious features that IP and ATM have to offer. Although IP and ATM often have been viewed as competitors, their complementary strengths and limitations from a natural alliance that combines the best aspects of both the technologies. For instance, one limitation of ATM networks has been the relatively large gap between the speed of the network paths and the control operations needed to configure those data paths to meet changing user needs. IP\u27s greatest strength, on the other hand, is the inherent flexibility and its capacity to adapt rapidly to changing conditions. These complementary strengths and limitations make it natural to combine IP with ATM to obtain the best that each has to offer. Over time many models and architectures have evolved for IP/ATM internetworking and they have impacted the fundamental thinking in internetworking IP and ATM. These technologies, architectures, models and implementations will be reviewed in greater detail in addressing possible issues in integrating these architectures s in a multi-service, enterprise network. The objective being to make recommendations as to the best means of interworking the two in exploiting the salient features of one another to provide a faster, reliable, scalable, robust, QoS aware network in the most economical manner. How IP will be carried over ATM when a commercial worldwide ATM network is deployed is not addressed and the details of such a network still remain in a state of flux to specify anything concrete. Our research findings culminated with a strong recommendation that the best model to adopt, in light of the impending integrated service requirements of future multi-service environments, is an ATM core with IP at the edges to realize the best of both technologies in delivering QoS guarantees in a seamless manner to any node in the enterprise

Implementing Virtual Privat Network in Small to Medium Sized Enterprises

Nowadays enterprises rely heavily on computer systems for storing and processing vital information, IT plays a major role in their businesses therefore all these systems must be safe and reliable. Computer networks are a major part of all these technologies; they provide the essential link between them, connecting them into one unified information network. However, the main requirement in all this is to implement a proper security system that will keep all these information secure and protect the privacy. Small or medium-sized enterprises need to have their branches interconnected with a rapid, reliable, cost-effective access to their resources. The ability to reach important company resources enables the employees to be more flexible and productive, especially when they have the flexibility to access those resources from remote offices, home, or when traveling. This level of connectivity is a core component of IT strategy in today’s business world and is critical for staying ahead of the competition. Virtual Private Networks (VPN), present businesses a solution to this need. A VPN allows an enterprise to build a secure communication network by leveraging the public Internet as a low-cost transportation mechanism. This increasing use of VPN is one of the key growth drivers for the increased deployment of firewalls