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

Towards a Resilient Openflow Channel Through MPTCP

In the recent years, Software Defined Networking (SDN) has changed the way networks are engineered, making them more flexible, programmable and dynamic. SDN advocates for the centralization of control functionalities in a central node, the so-called controller. This entity has a wide view of the entirenetwork, including the topology, facilitating the management and decreasing the complexity. However, the existence of a single entity running the complete control plane constitutes a single point of failure, thus triggering the need of improving the resiliency and reliability of the controller and the connectionbetween the control and the data plane. This paper presents a solution for the improvement of the resiliency and the reliability on the OpenFlow channel through the use of multipath TCP (MPTCP). The proposed solutionis based on the simultaneous use of in-band and out-of-band paths for the OpenFlow control channel, and includes a first experimental evaluation of the performance gains that can be achieved.This work has been partially funded by the H2020 collaborative Europe/Taiwan research project 5G-CORAL (grant num. 761586) and the EU H2020 5G-TRANSFORMER Project (grant num. 761536

Dataplane Specialization for High-performance OpenFlow Software Switching

OpenFlow is an amazingly expressive dataplane program- ming language, but this expressiveness comes at a severe performance price as switches must do excessive packet clas- sification in the fast path. The prevalent OpenFlow software switch architecture is therefore built on flow caching, but this imposes intricate limitations on the workloads that can be supported efficiently and may even open the door to mali- cious cache overflow attacks. In this paper we argue that in- stead of enforcing the same universal flow cache semantics to all OpenFlow applications and optimize for the common case, a switch should rather automatically specialize its dat- aplane piecemeal with respect to the configured workload. We introduce ES WITCH , a novel switch architecture that uses on-the-fly template-based code generation to compile any OpenFlow pipeline into efficient machine code, which can then be readily used as fast path. We present a proof- of-concept prototype and we demonstrate on illustrative use cases that ES WITCH yields a simpler architecture, superior packet processing speed, improved latency and CPU scala- bility, and predictable performance. Our prototype can eas- ily scale beyond 100 Gbps on a single Intel blade even with complex OpenFlow pipelines

Load-Balancing in Local and Metro-Area networks with MPTCP and OpenFlow

In this thesis, a novel load-balancing technique for local or metro-area traffic is proposed in mesh-style topologies. The technique uses Software Defined Networking (SDN) architecture with virtual local area network (VLAN) setups typically seen in a campus or small-to-medium enterprise environment. This was done to provide a possible solution or at least a platform to expand on for the load-balancing dilemma that network administrators face today. The transport layer protocol Multi-Path TCP (MPTCP) coupled with IP aliasing is also used. The trait of MPTCP of forming multiple subflows from sender to receiver depending on the availability of IP addresses at either the sender or receiver helps to divert traffic in the subflows across all available paths. The combination of MPTCP subflows with IP aliasing enables spreading out of the traffic load across greater number of links in the network, and thereby achieving load balancing and better network utilization. The traffic formed of each subflow would be forwarded across the network based on Hamiltonian \u27paths\u27 which are created in association with each switch in the topology which are directly connected to hosts. The amount of \u27paths\u27 in the topology would also depend on the number of VLANs setup for the hosts in the topology. This segregation would allow for network administrators to monitor network utilization across VLANs and give the ability to balance load across VLANs. We have devised several experiments in Mininet, and the experimentation showed promising results with significantly better throughput and network utilization compared to cases where normal TCP was used to send traffic from source to destination. Our study clearly shows the advantages of using MPTCP for load balancing purposes in SDN type architectures and provides a platform for future research on using VLANs, SDN, and MPTCP for network traffic management

An openflow architecture for energy-aware traffic engineering in mobile networks

To cope with the growing traffic demand, future mobile networks will be denser and integrate heterogeneous technologies. However, if not properly engineered, such networks may incur huge energy waste when there is little traffic, and may suffer from an unbearable management burden caused by the variety of technologies integrated. In this article, we propose and implement a novel management architecture for mobile networks based on OpenFlow, which supports resource-on-demand provisioning in a centralized control plane, and hides the technology specifics from the controller through the use of abstractions. The feasibility of the approach is demonstrated by a real-life prototype based on commercial off-the-shelf devices.This work has been partly supported by the European Community through the iJOIN (FP7-ICT-317941) and CROWD (FP7-ICT-318115) projects. Apart from this, the European Commission has no responsibility for the content of this article.Publicad