Internet Interconnection Ecosystem in Finland

For both fixed and mobile network operators, interconnection constitutes an indisputably key element to provide end users with a variety of services. Internet interconnection is particularly an intriguing subject due to the importance of the Internet in our everyday lives and our genuine curiosity to grasp its underlying structure. This thesis aims to provide a holistic approach to study the Internet interconnections in a nation-centric stance. To accomplish the objective, initially the method that breaks down the key features of the interconnection analysis is introduced. The nation-centric analysis is conducted for Finland by jointly utilizing the Internet registry data and collected Internet routing data. Covering the last decade of the Finnish Internet, the longitudinal analysis yields significant findings for the Internet address usage statistics and the level of multi-homed networks, along with the classification and inference of relationships between stakeholders in the interconnection ecosystem. The implications that the emerging interconnection models pose for the future global service delivery among both fixed and mobile networks are expounded from the perspective of the existing domestic interconnection practices. The longitudinal interconnectivity study allows us to comprehend both technical and business interfaces between market players by revealing a complete list of customer-provider relationships. Within a national milieu, the assessment of the current Internet market dynamics and future implications of emerging models can be considered in more rationally anticipated manner. Hence, authorities who desire to design new pricing schemes and policies for future networking interconnections can be guided more thoroughly

Managing the Transition from SNMP to NETCONF: Comparing Dual-Stack and Protocol Gateway Hybrid Approaches

As industries become increasingly automated and stressed to seek business advantages, they often have operational constraints that make modernization and security more challenging. Constraints exist such as low operating budgets, long operational lifetimes and infeasible network/device upgrade/modification paths. In order to bypass these constraints with minimal risk of disruption and perform ``no harm'', network administrators have come to rely on using dual-stack approaches, which allow legacy protocols to co-exist with modern ones. For example, if SNMP is required for managing legacy devices, and a newer protocol (NETCONF) is required for modern devices, then administrators simply modify firewall Access Control Lists (ACLs) to allow passage of both protocols. In today's networks, firewalls are ubiquitous, relatively inexpensive, and able to support multiple protocols (hence dual-stack) while providing network security. While investigating securing legacy devices in heterogeneous networks, it was determined that dual-stack firewall approaches do not provide adequate protection beyond layer three filtering of the IP stack. Therefore, the NETCONF/SNMP Protocol Gateway hybrid (NSPG) was developed as an alternative in environments where security is necessary, but legacy devices are infeasible to upgrade, replace, and modify. The NSPG allows network administrators to utilize only a single modern protocol (NETCONF) instead of both NETCONF and SNMP, and enforce additional security controls without modifying existing deployments. It has been demonstrated that legacy devices can be securely managed in a protocol-agnostic manner using low-cost commodity hardware (e.g., the RaspberryPi platform) with administrator-derived XML-based configuration policies