Toward a Programmable FIB Caching Architecture

The current Internet routing ecosystem is neither sustainable nor economical. More than 711K IPv4 routes and more than 41K IPv6 routes exist in current global Forwarding Information Base (FIBs) with growth rates increasing. This rapid growth has serious consequences, such as creating the need for costly FIB memory upgrades and increased potential for Internet service outages. And while FIB memories are power-hungry and prohibitively expensive, more than 70\% of the routes in FIBs carry no traffic for long time periods, a wasteful use of these expensive resources. Taking advantage of the emerging concept of programmable data plane, we design a programmable FIB caching architecture to address the existing concerns. Our preliminary evaluation results show that the architecture can significantly mitigate the global routing scalability and poor FIB utilization issues

Leveraging Programmable Data Plane For Compressing Forwarding Tables

The Forwarding Information Base (FIB) resides in the data plane of a routing device and is used to forward packets to a next-hop, based on packets\u27 destination IP addresses. The constant growth of a FIB forces network operators to spend more resources on maintaining memory with line-rate Longest Prefix Match (LPM) lookup in a FIB, namely, expensive and energy-hungry Ternary Content-Addressable Memory (TCAM) chips. In this work, we review two different approaches used to mitigate the FIB overflow problem. First, we investigate FIB aggregation, i.e., merging adjacent or overlapping routes with the same next-hop while preserving the forwarding behavior of a FIB. We propose a near-optimal algorithm, FIB Aggregation with Quick Selections (FAQS), that minimizes the FIB churn and speeds BGP update processing by more than twice. In the meantime, FAQS preserves a high compression ratio (at most 73\%). FAQS handles BGP updates incrementally, without the need of re-aggregating the entire FIB table. Second, we investigate FIB (or route) caching, when TCAM holds only a portion of a FIB that carries most of the traffic. We leverage the emerging concept of the programmable data plane to propose a Programmable FIB Caching Architecture (PFCA), that allows cache-victim selection at the line rate and significantly reduces the FIB churn compared to FIB aggregation. PFCA achieves 99.8% cache-hit ratio with only 3.3\% of the FIB placed in a FIB cache. Finally, we extend PFCA\u27s design with a novel approach of integrating incremental FIB aggregation and FIB caching. Such integration needed to overcome cache hiding challenge when a less specific prefix in a cache hides a more specific prefix in a secondary FIB table, which leads to incorrect LPM matching at the cache. In Combined FIB Caching and Aggregation (CFCA), cache-hit ratio is maximized up to 99.94% with only 2.5\% entries of the FIB, while the total number of route changes in TCAM is reduced by more than 40\% compared to low-churn FIB aggregation techniques

Design of a Hybrid Modular Switch

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) shed new light for the design, deployment, and management of cloud networks. Many network functions such as firewalls, load balancers, and intrusion detection systems can be virtualized by servers. However, network operators often have to sacrifice programmability in order to achieve high throughput, especially at networks' edge where complex network functions are required. Here, we design, implement, and evaluate Hybrid Modular Switch (HyMoS). The hybrid hardware/software switch is designed to meet requirements for modern-day NFV applications in providing high-throughput, with a high degree of programmability. HyMoS utilizes P4-compatible Network Interface Cards (NICs), PCI Express interface and CPU to act as line cards, switch fabric, and fabric controller respectively. In our implementation of HyMos, PCI Express interface is turned into a non-blocking switch fabric with a throughput of hundreds of Gigabits per second. Compared to existing NFV infrastructure, HyMoS offers modularity in hardware and software as well as a higher degree of programmability by supporting a superset of P4 language

Efficient caching through stateful SDN in named data networking

Named data networking (NDN) is an innovative paradigm to provide content-based services in future networks. As compared with legacy networks, naming of network packets and in-network caching of content make NDN more feasible for content dissemination. However, the implementation of NDN requires drastic changes to the existing network infrastructure. One feasible approach is to use software-defined networking (SDN), according to which the control of the network is delegated to a centralized controller, which configures the forwarding data plane. This approach leads to large signaling overhead and large end-to-end delays. In order to overcome these issues, we propose to enable NDN using a stateful data plane in the SDN network. In particular, we realize the functionality of an NDN node using a stateful SDN switch attached with a local cache for content storage and use OpenState to implement such an approach. In our solution, no involvement of the controller is required once the OpenState switch has been configured. We benchmark the performance of our solution against the traditional SDN approach considering several relevant metrics. Experimental results highlight the benefits of a stateful approach and of our implementation, which avoids signaling overhead and significantly reduces end-to-end delays.This work is partially supported by the H2020 5G-TRANSFORMER project (grant no. 761536) and the H2020 HIGHTS project (grant no. 636537). EURECOM acknowledges the support of its industrial members, namely, BMW Group, IABG, Monaco Telecom, Orange, SAP, ST Microelectronics, and Symantec

The Road Ahead for Networking: A Survey on ICN-IP Coexistence Solutions

In recent years, the current Internet has experienced an unexpected paradigm shift in the usage model, which has pushed researchers towards the design of the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm as a possible replacement of the existing architecture. Even though both Academia and Industry have investigated the feasibility and effectiveness of ICN, achieving the complete replacement of the Internet Protocol (IP) is a challenging task. Some research groups have already addressed the coexistence by designing their own architectures, but none of those is the final solution to move towards the future Internet considering the unaltered state of the networking. To design such architecture, the research community needs now a comprehensive overview of the existing solutions that have so far addressed the coexistence. The purpose of this paper is to reach this goal by providing the first comprehensive survey and classification of the coexistence architectures according to their features (i.e., deployment approach, deployment scenarios, addressed coexistence requirements and architecture or technology used) and evaluation parameters (i.e., challenges emerging during the deployment and the runtime behaviour of an architecture). We believe that this paper will finally fill the gap required for moving towards the design of the final coexistence architecture.Comment: 23 pages, 16 figures, 3 table

Parallel Architectures for Planetary Exploration Requirements (PAPER)

The Parallel Architectures for Planetary Exploration Requirements (PAPER) project is essentially research oriented towards technology insertion issues for NASA's unmanned planetary probes. It was initiated to complement and augment the long-term efforts for space exploration with particular reference to NASA/LaRC's (NASA Langley Research Center) research needs for planetary exploration missions of the mid and late 1990s. The requirements for space missions as given in the somewhat dated Advanced Information Processing Systems (AIPS) requirements document are contrasted with the new requirements from JPL/Caltech involving sensor data capture and scene analysis. It is shown that more stringent requirements have arisen as a result of technological advancements. Two possible architectures, the AIPS Proof of Concept (POC) configuration and the MAX Fault-tolerant dataflow multiprocessor, were evaluated. The main observation was that the AIPS design is biased towards fault tolerance and may not be an ideal architecture for planetary and deep space probes due to high cost and complexity. The MAX concepts appears to be a promising candidate, except that more detailed information is required. The feasibility for adding neural computation capability to this architecture needs to be studied. Key impact issues for architectural design of computing systems meant for planetary missions were also identified

An efficient location-based forwarding strategy for named data networking and LEO satellite communications

Low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations are increasingly gaining attention as future global Internet providers. At the same time, named data networking (NDN) is a new data-centric architecture that has been recently proposed to replace the classic TCP/IP architecture since it is particularly well suited to the most common usage of the Internet nowadays as a content delivery network. Certainly, the use of NDN is especially convenient in highly dynamic network environments, such as those of next LEO constellations incorporating inter-satellite links (ISL). Among other native facilities, such as inbuilt security, NDN readily supports the mobility of clients, thus helping to overcome one of the main problems raised in LEO satellite networks. Moreover, thanks to a stateful forwarding plane with support for multicast transmission and inbuilt data caches, NDN is also able to provide a more efficient usage of the installed transmission capacity. In this paper, we propose a new location-based forwarding strategy for LEO satellite networks that takes advantage of the knowledge of the relative position of the satellites and the grid structure formed by the ISLs to perform the forwarding of NDN packets. So, forwarding at each node is done using only local information (node and destination locations), without the need of interchanging information between nodes, as is the case with conventional routing protocols. Using simulation, we show that the proposed forwarding strategy is a good candidate to promote the efficient and effective future use of the NDN architecture in LEO satellite networks.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación | Ref. PID2020-113240RB-I0

Hierarchical Content Stores in High-speed ICN Routers: Emulation and Prototype Implementation

Recent work motivates the design of Information-centric rou-ters that make use of hierarchies of memory to jointly scale in the size and speed of content stores. The present paper advances this understanding by (i) instantiating a general purpose two-layer packet-level caching system, (ii) investigating the solution design space via emulation, and (iii) introducing a proof-of-concept prototype. The emulation-based study reveals insights about the broad design space, the expected impact of workload, and gains due to multi-threaded execution. The full-blown system prototype experimentally confirms that, by exploiting both DRAM and SSD memory technologies, ICN routers can sustain cache operations in excess of 10Gbps running on off-the-shelf hardware