End-Site Routing Support for IPv6 Multihoming

Multihoming is currently widely used to provide fault tolerance and traffic engineering capabilities. It is expected that, as telecommunication costs decrease, its adoption will become more and more prevalent. Current multihoming support is not designed to scale up to the expected number of multihomed sites, so alternative solutions are required, especially for IPv6. In order to preserve interdomain routing scalability, the new multihoming solution has to be compatible with Provider Aggregatable addressing. However, such addressing scheme imposes the configuration of multiple prefixes in multihomed sites, which in turn causes several operational difficulties within those sites that may even result in communication failures when all the ISPs are working properly. In this paper we propose the adoption of Source Address Dependent routing within the multihomed site to overcome the identified difficulties.Publicad

Study of BGP Convergence Time

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), a path vector routing protocol, is a widespread exterior gateway protocol (EGP) in the internet. Extensive deployment of the new technologies in internet, protocols need to have continuous improvements in its behavior and operations. New routing technologies conserve a top level of service availability. Hence, due to topological changes, BGP needs to achieve a fast network convergence. Now a days size of the network growing very rapidly. To maintain the high scalability in the network BGP needs to avoid instability. The instability and failures may cause the network into an unstable state, which significantly increases the network convergence time. This paper summarizes the various approaches like BGP policies, instability, and fault detection etc. to improve the convergence time of BGP

Distributed Internet security and measurement

The Internet has developed into an important economic, military, academic, and social resource. It is a complex network, comprised of tens of thousands of independently operated networks, called Autonomous Systems (ASes). A significant strength of the Internet\u27s design, one which enabled its rapid growth in terms of users and bandwidth, is that its underlying protocols (such as IP, TCP, and BGP) are distributed. Users and networks alike can attach and detach from the Internet at will, without causing major disruptions to global Internet connectivity. This dissertation shows that the Internet\u27s distributed, and often redundant structure, can be exploited to increase the security of its protocols, particularly BGP (the Internet\u27s interdomain routing protocol). It introduces Pretty Good BGP, an anomaly detection protocol coupled with an automated response that can protect individual networks from BGP attacks. It also presents statistical measurements of the Internet\u27s structure and uses them to create a model of Internet growth. This work could be used, for instance, to test upcoming routing protocols on ensemble of large, Internet-like graphs. Finally, this dissertation shows that while the Internet is designed to be agnostic to political influence, it is actually quite centralized at the country level. With the recent rise in country-level Internet policies, such as nation-wide censorship and warrantless wiretaps, this centralized control could have significant impact on international reachability

Stable and Practical AS Relationship Inference with ProbLink

Knowledge of the business relationships between Autonomous Systems (ASes) is essential to understanding the behavior of the Internet routing system. Despite significant progress in the development of sophisticated relationship inference algorithms, the resulting datasets are impractical for many critical real-world applications, cannot offer adequate predictability in the configuration of routing policies, and suffer from inference oscillations. To achieve more practical and stable relationship inferences we first illuminate the root causes of the contradictions between these shortcomings and the near-perfect validation results of AS-Rank, the state-of-the-art relationship inference algorithm. Using a "naive" inference approach as a benchmark, we find that the available validation datasets over-represent AS links with easier inference requirements. We identify which types of links are harder to infer, and we develop appropriate validation subsets to enable more representative evaluation. We then develop a probabilistic algorithm, ProbLink, to overcome the inference barriers for hard links, such as non-valley-free routing, limited visibility, and non-conventional peering practices. To this end, we identify key interconnection features that provide stochastically informative and highly predictive relationship inference signals. Compared to AS-Rank, our approach reduces the error rate for all links by 1.6\times×, and importantly, by up to 6.1 times for different types of hard links. We demonstrate the practical significance of our improvements by evaluating their impact on three applications. Compared to the current state-of-the-art, ProbLink increases the precision and recall of route leak detection by 4.1 times and 3.4 times respectively, reveals 27% more complex relationships, and increases the precision of predicting the impact of selective advertisements by 34%

Eigenvector Centrality Distribution for Characterization of Protein Allosteric Pathways

Determining the principal energy pathways for allosteric communication in biomolecules, that occur as a result of thermal motion, remains challenging due to the intrinsic complexity of the systems involved. Graph theory provides an approach for making sense of such complexity, where allosteric proteins can be represented as networks of amino acids. In this work, we establish the eigenvector centrality metric in terms of the mutual information, as a mean of elucidating the allosteric mechanism that regulates the enzymatic activity of proteins. Moreover, we propose a strategy to characterize the range of the physical interactions that underlie the allosteric process. In particular, the well known enzyme, imidazol glycerol phosphate synthase (IGPS), is utilized to test the proposed methodology. The eigenvector centrality measurement successfully describes the allosteric pathways of IGPS, and allows to pinpoint key amino acids in terms of their relevance in the momentum transfer process. The resulting insight can be utilized for refining the control of IGPS activity, widening the scope for its engineering. Furthermore, we propose a new centrality metric quantifying the relevance of the surroundings of each residue. In addition, the proposed technique is validated against experimental solution NMR measurements yielding fully consistent results. Overall, the methodologies proposed in the present work constitute a powerful and cost effective strategy to gain insight on the allosteric mechanism of proteins

Inferring hidden features in the Internet (PhD thesis)

The Internet is a large-scale decentralized system that is composed of thousands of independent networks. In this system, there are two main components, interdomain routing and traffic, that are vital inputs for many tasks such as traffic engineering, security, and business intelligence. However, due to the decentralized structure of the Internet, global knowledge of both interdomain routing and traffic is hard to come by. In this dissertation, we address a set of statistical inference problems with the goal of extending the knowledge of the interdomain-level Internet. In the first part of this dissertation we investigate the relationship between the interdomain topology and an individual network’s inference ability. We first frame the questions through abstract analysis of idealized topologies, and then use actual routing measurements and topologies to study the ability of real networks to infer traffic flows. In the second part, we study the ability of networks to identify which paths flow through their network. We first discuss that answering this question is surprisingly hard due to the design of interdomain routing systems where each network can learn only a limited set of routes. Therefore, network operators have to rely on observed traffic. However, observed traffic can only identify that a particular route passes through its network but not that a route does not pass through its network. In order to solve the routing inference problem, we propose a nonparametric inference technique that works quite accurately. The key idea behind our technique is measuring the distances between destinations. In order to accomplish that, we define a metric called Routing State Distance (RSD) to measure distances in terms of routing similarity. Finally, in the third part, we study our new metric, RSD in detail. Using RSD we address an important and difficult problem of characterizing the set of paths between networks. The collection of the paths across networks is a great source to understand important phenomena in the Internet as path selections are driven by the economic and performance considerations of the networks. We show that RSD has a number of appealing properties that can discover these hidden phenomena

Traffic Engineering for LISP-Enabled Networks

Title from PDF of title page, viewed on July 26, 2016Thesis advisor: Deep MedhiVitaIncludes bibliographical references (pages 105-106)Thesis (M.S.)--School of Computing and Engineering. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2016Inter-Domain Traffic engineering in the Internet faces serious limitations because of the current IP routing and addressing architecture. This coupled with Border Gateway Protocol’s (BGP’s) way of selecting performance-blind paths forces ISPs to de-aggregate IP prefixes to control the flow of packets between ASes. Advertising such de-aggregated, surplus prefixes for local benefits is causing the routing table of the Default Free Zone (DFZ) to grow rapidly, which contribute to routing scalability problems. Recently, in order to address this scalability issue, LISP (Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol) has been proposed, which separates an address space into a non-routable End-Point Identifiers (EIDs) and a routable Routing Locators (RLOCs), where each EIDs can be associated to more than one (multiple) RLOCs. In this work, we discuss two optimization models for traffic engineering in LISP-enabled network which exploits the route diversity or the path diversity the LISP inherently provides by introducing the concept of grouping multiple RLOCs with traffic proportioning or load-balancing as the optimization criterion. We compare the models to the base case that identifies with the current routing architecture (i.e. no proportioning). Through our study, we observe that LISP-based traffic engineering with multiple RLOCs offers noticeable benefits compared to when we do traffic engineering without proportioning demands to multiple RLOCs, except when the network is uniform in terms of load and capacity.Introduction -- Locator/Identifier Seperation Protocol (LISP) -- Current traffic engineering practices -- RLOC-driven traffic engineering in a LISP network -- Summary -- Future wor

Multipath inter-domain policy routing

Dissertação submetida para a obtenção do grau de Doutor em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de ComputadoresRouting can be abstracted to be a path nding problem in a graph that models the network. The problem can be modelled using an algebraic approach that describes the way routes are calculated and ranked. The shortest path problem is the most common form and consists in nding the path with the smallest cost. The inter-domain scenario introduces some new challenges to the routing problem: the routing is performed between independently con gured and managed networks; the ranking of the paths is not based on measurable metrics but on policies; and the forwarding is destination based hop-by-hop. In this thesis we departed from the Border gateway Protocol (BGP) identifying its main problems and elaborating on some ideal characteristics for a routing protocol suited for the inter-domain reality. The main areas and contributions of this work are the following: The current state of the art in algebraic modeling of routing problems is used to provide a list of possible alternative conditions for the correct operation of such protocols. For each condition the consequences in terms of optimality and network restrictions are presented. A routing architecture for the inter-domain scenario is presented. It is proven that it achieves a multipath routing solution in nite time without causing forwarding loops. We discuss its advantages and weaknesses. A tra c-engineering scheme is designed to take advantage of the proposed architecture. It works using only local information and cooperation of remote ASes to minimize congestion in the network with minimal signalling. Finally a general model of a routing protocol based on hierarchical policies is used to study how e cient is the protocol operation when the correctness conditions are met. This results in some conclusions on how the policies should be chosen and applied in order to achieve speci c goals.Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation -(FCT/MCTES)grant SFRH/BD/44476/2008; CTS multi-annual funding project PEst OE/EEI/UI0066/2011; MPSat project PTDC/EEA TEL/099074/2008; OPPORTUNISTICCR project PTDC/EEA-TEL/115981/2009; Fentocells project PTDC/EEA TEL/120666/201

Steering hyper-giants' traffic at scale

Large content providers, known as hyper-giants, are responsible for sending the majority of the content traffic to consumers. These hyper-giants operate highly distributed infrastructures to cope with the ever-increasing demand for online content. To achieve 40 commercial-grade performance of Web applications, enhanced end-user experience, improved reliability, and scaled network capacity, hyper-giants are increasingly interconnecting with eyeball networks at multiple locations. This poses new challenges for both (1) the eyeball networks having to perform complex inbound traffic engineering, and (2) hyper-giants having to map end-user requests to appropriate servers. We report on our multi-year experience in designing, building, rolling-out, and operating the first-ever large scale system, the Flow Director, which enables automated cooperation between one of the largest eyeball networks and a leading hyper-giant. We use empirical data collected at the eyeball network to evaluate its impact over two years of operation. We find very high compliance of the hyper-giant to the Flow Director’s recommendations, resulting in (1) close to optimal user-server mapping, and (2) 15% reduction of the hyper-giant’s traffic overhead on the ISP’s long-haul links, i.e., benefits for both parties and end-users alike.EC/H2020/679158/EU/Resolving the Tussle in the Internet: Mapping, Architecture, and Policy Making/ResolutioNe

Strategies for internet route control: past, present and future

Uno de los problemas más complejos en redes de computadores es el de proporcionar garantías de calidad y confiabilidad a las comunicaciones de datos entre entidades que se encuentran en dominios distintos. Esto se debe a un amplio conjunto de razones -- las cuales serán analizadas en detalle en esta tesis -- pero de manera muy breve podemos destacar: i) la limitada flexibilidad que presenta el modelo actual de encaminamiento inter-dominio en materia de ingeniería de tráfico; ii) la naturaleza distribuida y potencialmente antagónica de las políticas de encaminamiento, las cuales son administradas individualmente y sin coordinación por cada dominio en Internet; y iii) las carencias del protocolo de encaminamiento inter-dominio utilizado en Internet, denominado BGP (Border Gateway Protocol).El objetivo de esta tesis, es precisamente el estudio y propuesta de soluciones que permitan mejorar drásticamente la calidad y confiabilidad de las comunicaciones de datos en redes conformadas por múltiples dominios.Una de las principales herramientas para lograr este fin, es tomar el control de las decisiones de encaminamiento y las posibles acciones de ingeniería de tráfico llevadas a cabo en cada dominio. Por este motivo, esta tesis explora distintas estrategias de como controlar en forma precisa y eficiente, tanto el encaminamiento como las decisiones de ingeniería de tráfico en Internet. En la actualidad este control reside principalmente en BGP, el cual como indicamos anteriormente, es uno de los principales responsables de las limitantes existentes. El paso natural sería reemplazar a BGP, pero su despliegue actual y su reconocida operatividad en muchos otros aspectos, resultan claros indicadores de que su sustitución (ó su posible evolución) será probablemente gradual. En este escenario, esta tesis propone analizar y contribuir con nuevas estrategias en materia de control de encaminamiento e ingeniería de tráfico inter-dominio en tres marcos temporales distintos: i) en la actualidad en redes IP; ii) en un futuro cercano en redes IP/MPLS (MultiProtocol Label Switching); y iii) a largo plazo en redes ópticas, modelando así una evolución progresiva y realista, facilitando el reemplazo gradual de BGP.Más concretamente, este trabajo analiza y contribuye mediante: - La propuesta de estrategias incrementales basadas en el Control Inteligente de Rutas (Intelligent Route Control, IRC) para redes IP en la actualidad. Las estrategias propuestas en este caso son de carácter incremental en el sentido de que interaccionan con BGP, solucionando varias de las carencias que éste presenta sin llegar a proponer aún su reemplazo. - La propuesta de estrategias concurrentes basadas en extender el concepto del PCE (Path Computation Element) proveniente del IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) para redes IP/MPLS en un futuro cercano. Las estrategias propuestas en este caso son de carácter concurrente en el sentido de que no interaccionan con BGP y pueden ser desplegadas en forma paralela. En este caso, BGP continúa controlando el encaminamiento y las acciones de ingeniería de tráfico inter-dominio del tráfico IP, pero el control del tráfico IP/MPLS se efectúa en forma independiente de BGP mediante los PCEs.- La propuesta de estrategias que reemplazan completamente a BGP basadas en la incorporación de un nuevo agente de control, al cual denominamos IDRA (Inter-Domain Routing Agent). Estos agentes proporcionan un plano de control dedicado, físicamente independiente del plano de datos, y con gran capacidad computacional para las futuras redes ópticas multi-dominio.Los resultados expuestos aquí validan la efectividad de las estrategias propuestas, las cuales mejoran significativamente tanto la concepción como la performance de las actuales soluciones en el área de Control Inteligente de Rutas, del esperado PCE en un futuro cercano, y de las propuestas existentes para extender BGP al área de redes ópticas.One of the most complex problems in computer networks is how to provide guaranteed performance and reliability to the communications carried out between nodes located in different domains. This is due to several reasons -- which will be analyzed in detail in this thesis -- but in brief, this is mostly due to: i) the limited capabilities of the current inter-domain routing model in terms of Traffic Engineering (TE); ii) the distributed and potentially conflicting nature of policy-based routing, where routing policies are managed independently and without coordination among domains; and iii) the clear limitations of the inter-domain routing protocol, namely, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). The goal of this thesis is precisely to study and propose solutions allowing to drastically improve the performance and reliability of inter-domain communications. One of the most important tools to achieve this goal, is to control the routing and TE decisions performed by routing domains. Therefore, this thesis explores different strategies on how to control such decisions in a highly efficient and accurate way. At present, this control mostly resides in BGP, but as mentioned above, BGP is in fact one of the main causes of the existing limitations. The natural next-step would be to replace BGP, but the large installed base at present together with its recognized effectiveness in other aspects, are clear indicators that its replacement (or its possible evolution) will probably be gradually put into practice.In this framework, this thesis proposes to to study and contribute with novel strategies to control the routing and TE decisions of domains in three different time frames: i) at present in IP multi-domain networks; ii) in the near-future in IP/MPLS (MultiProtocol Label Switching) multi- domain networks; and iii) in the future optical Internet, modeling in this way a realistic and progressive evolution, facilitating the gradual replacement of BGP.More specifically, the contributions in this thesis can be summarized as follows. - We start by proposing incremental strategies based on Intelligent Route Control (IRC) solutions for IP networks. The strategies proposed in this case are incremental in the sense that they interact with BGP, and tackle several of its well-known limitations. - Then, we propose a set of concurrent route control strategies for MPLS networks, based on broadening the concept of the Path Computation Element (PCE) coming from the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). Our strategies are concurrent in the sense that they do not interact directly with BGP, and they can be deployed in parallel. In this case, BGP still controlls the routing and TE actions concerning regular IP-based traffic, but not how IP/MPLS paths are routed and controlled. These are handled independently by the PCEs.- We end with the proposal of a set of route control strategies for multi-domain optical networks, where BGP has been completely replaced. These strategies are supported by the introduction of a new route control element, which we named Inter-Domain Routing Agent (IDRA). These IDRAs provide a dedicated control plane, i.e., physically independent from the data plane, and with high computational capacity for future optical networks.The results obtained validate the effectiveness of the strategies proposed here, and confirm that our proposals significantly improve both the conception and performance of the current IRC solutions, the expected PCE in the near-future, as well as the existing proposals about the optical extension of BGP.Postprint (published version