5,685 research outputs found
The Dynamics of Internet Traffic: Self-Similarity, Self-Organization, and Complex Phenomena
The Internet is the most complex system ever created in human history.
Therefore, its dynamics and traffic unsurprisingly take on a rich variety of
complex dynamics, self-organization, and other phenomena that have been
researched for years. This paper is a review of the complex dynamics of
Internet traffic. Departing from normal treatises, we will take a view from
both the network engineering and physics perspectives showing the strengths and
weaknesses as well as insights of both. In addition, many less covered
phenomena such as traffic oscillations, large-scale effects of worm traffic,
and comparisons of the Internet and biological models will be covered.Comment: 63 pages, 7 figures, 7 tables, submitted to Advances in Complex
System
A contrasting look at self-organization in the Internet and next-generation communication networks
This article examines contrasting notions of self-organization in the Internet and next-generation communication networks, by reviewing in some detail recent evidence regarding several of the more popular attempts to explain prominent features of Internet structure and behavior as "emergent phenomena." In these examples, what might appear to the nonexpert as "emergent self-organization" in the Internet actually results from well conceived (albeit perhaps ad hoc) design, with explanations that are mathematically rigorous, in agreement with engineering reality, and fully consistent with network measurements. These examples serve as concrete starting points from which networking researchers can assess whether or not explanations involving self-organization are relevant or appropriate in the context of next-generation communication networks, while also highlighting the main differences between approaches to self-organization that are rooted in engineering design vs. those inspired by statistical physics
Internet's Critical Path Horizon
Internet is known to display a highly heterogeneous structure and complex
fluctuations in its traffic dynamics. Congestion seems to be an inevitable
result of user's behavior coupled to the network dynamics and it effects should
be minimized by choosing appropriate routing strategies. But what are the
requirements of routing depth in order to optimize the traffic flow? In this
paper we analyse the behavior of Internet traffic with a topologically
realistic spatial structure as described in a previous study (S-H. Yook et al.
,Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA, {\bf 99} (2002) 13382). The model involves
self-regulation of packet generation and different levels of routing depth. It
is shown that it reproduces the relevant key, statistical features of
Internet's traffic. Moreover, we also report the existence of a critical path
horizon defining a transition from low-efficient traffic to highly efficient
flow. This transition is actually a direct consequence of the web's small world
architecture exploited by the routing algorithm. Once routing tables reach the
network diameter, the traffic experiences a sudden transition from a
low-efficient to a highly-efficient behavior. It is conjectured that routing
policies might have spontaneously reached such a compromise in a distributed
manner. Internet would thus be operating close to such critical path horizon.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures. To appear in European Journal of Physics B (2004
CAIR: Using Formal Languages to Study Routing, Leaking, and Interception in BGP
The Internet routing protocol BGP expresses topological reachability and
policy-based decisions simultaneously in path vectors. A complete view on the
Internet backbone routing is given by the collection of all valid routes, which
is infeasible to obtain due to information hiding of BGP, the lack of
omnipresent collection points, and data complexity. Commonly, graph-based data
models are used to represent the Internet topology from a given set of BGP
routing tables but fall short of explaining policy contexts. As a consequence,
routing anomalies such as route leaks and interception attacks cannot be
explained with graphs.
In this paper, we use formal languages to represent the global routing system
in a rigorous model. Our CAIR framework translates BGP announcements into a
finite route language that allows for the incremental construction of minimal
route automata. CAIR preserves route diversity, is highly efficient, and
well-suited to monitor BGP path changes in real-time. We formally derive
implementable search patterns for route leaks and interception attacks. In
contrast to the state-of-the-art, we can detect these incidents. In practical
experiments, we analyze public BGP data over the last seven years
Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks
In this chapter, we present a literature survey of an emerging, cutting-edge,
and multi-disciplinary field of research at the intersection of Robotics and
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) which we refer to as Robotic Wireless Sensor
Networks (RWSN). We define a RWSN as an autonomous networked multi-robot system
that aims to achieve certain sensing goals while meeting and maintaining
certain communication performance requirements, through cooperative control,
learning and adaptation. While both of the component areas, i.e., Robotics and
WSN, are very well-known and well-explored, there exist a whole set of new
opportunities and research directions at the intersection of these two fields
which are relatively or even completely unexplored. One such example would be
the use of a set of robotic routers to set up a temporary communication path
between a sender and a receiver that uses the controlled mobility to the
advantage of packet routing. We find that there exist only a limited number of
articles to be directly categorized as RWSN related works whereas there exist a
range of articles in the robotics and the WSN literature that are also relevant
to this new field of research. To connect the dots, we first identify the core
problems and research trends related to RWSN such as connectivity,
localization, routing, and robust flow of information. Next, we classify the
existing research on RWSN as well as the relevant state-of-the-arts from
robotics and WSN community according to the problems and trends identified in
the first step. Lastly, we analyze what is missing in the existing literature,
and identify topics that require more research attention in the future
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
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