11,883 research outputs found
From internet architecture research to standards
Many Internet architectural research initiatives have been undertaken over last twenty years. None of them actually reached their intended goal: the evolution of the Internet architecture is still driven by its protocols not by genuine architectural evolutions. As this approach becomes the main limiting factor of Internet growth and application deployment, this paper proposes an alternative research path starting from the root causes (the progressive depletion of the design principles of the Internet) and motivates the need for a common architectural foundation. For this purpose, it proposes a practical methodology to incubate architectural research results as part of the standardization process
Diagnose network failures via data-plane analysis
Diagnosing problems in networks is a time-consuming and error-prone process. Previous tools to assist operators primarily focus on analyzing control
plane configuration. Configuration analysis is limited in that it cannot find
bugs in router software, and is harder to generalize across protocols since it
must model complex configuration languages and dynamic protocol behavior.
This paper studies an alternate approach: diagnosing problems through
static analysis of the data plane. This approach can catch bugs that are
invisible at the level of configuration files, and simplifies unified analysis of a
network across many protocols and implementations. We present Anteater, a
tool for checking invariants in the data plane. Anteater translates high-level
network invariants into boolean satisfiability problems, checks them against
network state using a SAT solver, and reports counterexamples if violations
have been found. Applied to a large campus network, Anteater revealed 23
bugs, including forwarding loops and stale ACL rules, with only five false
positives. Nine of these faults are being fixed by campus network operators
Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications
Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for
the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research
experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts
today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited
abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes,
thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led
to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at
formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism
are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of
clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN)
paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right
kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence
in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and
synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a
self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in
formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial
Two-stage wireless network emulation
Testing and deploying mobile wireless networks and applications are very challenging tasks, due to the network size and administration as well as node mobility management. Well known simulation tools provide a more flexible environment but they do not run in real time and they rely on models of the developed system rather than on the system itself. Emulation is a hybrid approach allowing real application and traffic to be run over a simulated network, at the expense of accuracy when the number of nodes is too important. In this paper, emulation is split in two stages : first, the simulation of network conditions is precomputed so that it does not undergo real-time constraints that decrease its accuracy ; second, real applications and traffic are run on an emulation platform where the precomputed events are scheduled in soft real-time. This allows the use of accurate models for node mobility, radio signal propagation and communication stacks. An example shows that a simple situation can be simply tested with real applications and traffic while relying on accurate models. The consistency between the simulation results and the emulated conditions is also illustrated
Network-wide Configuration Synthesis
Computer networks are hard to manage. Given a set of high-level requirements
(e.g., reachability, security), operators have to manually figure out the
individual configuration of potentially hundreds of devices running complex
distributed protocols so that they, collectively, compute a compatible
forwarding state. Not surprisingly, operators often make mistakes which lead to
downtimes. To address this problem, we present a novel synthesis approach that
automatically computes correct network configurations that comply with the
operator's requirements. We capture the behavior of existing routers along with
the distributed protocols they run in stratified Datalog. Our key insight is to
reduce the problem of finding correct input configurations to the task of
synthesizing inputs for a stratified Datalog program. To solve this synthesis
task, we introduce a new algorithm that synthesizes inputs for stratified
Datalog programs. This algorithm is applicable beyond the domain of networks.
We leverage our synthesis algorithm to construct the first network-wide
configuration synthesis system, called SyNET, that support multiple interacting
routing protocols (OSPF and BGP) and static routes. We show that our system is
practical and can infer correct input configurations, in a reasonable amount
time, for networks of realistic size (> 50 routers) that forward packets for
multiple traffic classes.Comment: 24 Pages, short version published in CAV 201
A Test Bed for Evaluating the Performance of IoT Networks
The use of smaller, personal IoT networks has increased over the past several years. These devices demand a lot of resources but only have limited access. To establish and sustain a flexible network connection, 6LoWPAN with RPL protocol is commonly used. While RPL provides a low-cost solution for connection, it lacks load balancing mechanisms. Improvements in OF load balancing can be implemented to strengthen network stability. This paper proposes a test bed configuration to show the toll of frequent parent switching on 6LoWPAN. Contiki’s RPL 6LoWPAN software runs on STM32 Nucleo microcontrollers with expansion boards for this test bed. The configuration tests frequency of parent changes and packet loss to demonstrate network instability of different RPL OFs. Tests on MRHOF for RPL were executed to confirm the working configuration. Results, with troubleshooting and improvements, show a working bed. The laid-out configuration provides a means for testing network stability in IoT networks
The STRESS Method for Boundary-point Performance Analysis of End-to-end Multicast Timer-Suppression Mechanisms
Evaluation of Internet protocols usually uses random scenarios or scenarios
based on designers' intuition. Such approach may be useful for average-case
analysis but does not cover boundary-point (worst or best-case) scenarios. To
synthesize boundary-point scenarios a more systematic approach is needed.In
this paper, we present a method for automatic synthesis of worst and best case
scenarios for protocol boundary-point evaluation.
Our method uses a fault-oriented test generation (FOTG) algorithm for
searching the protocol and system state space to synthesize these scenarios.
The algorithm is based on a global finite state machine (FSM) model. We extend
the algorithm with timing semantics to handle end-to-end delays and address
performance criteria. We introduce the notion of a virtual LAN to represent
delays of the underlying multicast distribution tree. The algorithms used in
our method utilize implicit backward search using branch and bound techniques
and start from given target events. This aims to reduce the search complexity
drastically. As a case study, we use our method to evaluate variants of the
timer suppression mechanism, used in various multicast protocols, with respect
to two performance criteria: overhead of response messages and response time.
Simulation results for reliable multicast protocols show that our method
provides a scalable way for synthesizing worst-case scenarios automatically.
Results obtained using stress scenarios differ dramatically from those obtained
through average-case analyses. We hope for our method to serve as a model for
applying systematic scenario generation to other multicast protocols.Comment: 24 pages, 10 figures, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (ToN) [To
appear
IETF standardization in the field of the Internet of Things (IoT): a survey
Smart embedded objects will become an important part of what is called the Internet of Things. However, the integration of embedded devices into the Internet introduces several challenges, since many of the existing Internet technologies and protocols were not designed for this class of devices. In the past few years, there have been many efforts to enable the extension of Internet technologies to constrained devices. Initially, this resulted in proprietary protocols and architectures. Later, the integration of constrained devices into the Internet was embraced by IETF, moving towards standardized IP-based protocols. In this paper, we will briefly review the history of integrating constrained devices into the Internet, followed by an extensive overview of IETF standardization work in the 6LoWPAN, ROLL and CoRE working groups. This is complemented with a broad overview of related research results that illustrate how this work can be extended or used to tackle other problems and with a discussion on open issues and challenges. As such the aim of this paper is twofold: apart from giving readers solid insights in IETF standardization work on the Internet of Things, it also aims to encourage readers to further explore the world of Internet-connected objects, pointing to future research opportunities
- …