Naming and discovery in networks : architecture and economics

In less than three decades, the Internet was transformed from a research network available to the academic community into an international communication infrastructure. Despite its tremendous success, there is a growing consensus in the research community that the Internet has architectural limitations that need to be addressed in a effort to design a future Internet. Among the main technical limitations are the lack of mobility support, and the lack of security and trust. The Internet, and particularly TCP/IP, identifies endpoints using a location/routing identifier, the IP address. Coupling the endpoint identifier to the location identifier hinders mobility and poorly identifies the actual endpoint. On the other hand, the lack of security has been attributed to limitations in both the network and the endpoint. Authentication for example is one of the main concerns in the architecture and is hard to implement partly due to lack of identity support. The general problem that this dissertation is concerned with is that of designing a future Internet. Towards this end, we focus on two specific sub-problems. The first problem is the lack of a framework for thinking about architectures and their design implications. It was obvious after surveying the literature that the majority of the architectural work remains idiosyncratic and descriptions of network architectures are mostly idiomatic. This has led to the overloading of architectural terms, and to the emergence of a large body of network architecture proposals with no clear understanding of their cross similarities, compatibility points, their unique properties, and architectural performance and soundness. On the other hand, the second problem concerns the limitations of traditional naming and discovery schemes in terms of service differentiation and economic incentives. One of the recurring themes in the community is the need to separate an entity\u27s identifier from its locator to enhance mobility and security. Separation of identifier and locator is a widely accepted design principle for a future Internet. Separation however requires a process to translate from the identifier to the locator when discovering a network path to some identified entity. We refer to this process as identifier-based discovery, or simply discovery, and we recognize two limitations that are inherent in the design of traditional discovery schemes. The first limitation is the homogeneity of the service where all entities are assumed to have the same discovery performance requirements. The second limitation is the inherent incentive mismatch as it relates to sharing the cost of discovery. This dissertation addresses both subproblems, the architectural framework as well as the naming and discovery limitations

Towards a Taxonomy of Inter-network Architectures

Over the past decade, research on network architecture design has intensified. However, contributions to the field have mainly been idiosyncratic and architectural descriptions remain idiomatic. This state of affairs has led to the emergence of a large body of network architecture proposals with no clear indication of their compatibility points, their cross similarities, and their differences. Thus, a taxonomy of network architectures that provides a framework for better understanding, organizing, and thinking about the complex architecture design space would be a timely contribution. This paper presents a first step in that direction by attempting a classification based on the architecture\u27s information model. The taxonomy is applied to a special network architecture highlighting its descriptive and classification powers

Identifier-Based Discovery in Large-Scale Networks

The design of any network mechanism that requires collaboration among selfish agents could only benefit from accounting for the complex social and economic interactions and incentives of the agents using the design. This chapter presents a broad treatment of the main economic issues that arise in the context of identifier-based discovery on large scale networks, particularly on the Internet. An “identified” object (such as a node or service), referred to as a player, demands to be discoverable by the rest of the network on its “identifier”. A discovery scheme provides such a service to the players and incurs a cost for doing so. Providing such a service while accounting for the cost and making sure that the incentives of the players are aligned is the general economic problem that we address in this work. After introducing the identifier-based discovery problem, we present a taxonomy of discovery schemes and proposals based on their business model and we pose several questions that are becoming increasingly important as we proceed to design the inter-network of the future. An incentive model for distributed discovery in the context of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and path-vector protocols in general is then presented. We model BGP route distribution and computation using a game in which a BGP speaker advertises its prefix to its direct neighbors promising them a reward for further distributing the route deeper into the network. The neighbors do the same thing with their direct neighbors, and so on. The result of this cascaded route distribution is a globally advertised prefix and hence discoverability. We present initial results on the existence of equilibria in the game and we motivate our ongoing work

Efficient User Controlled Inter-Domain SIP Mobility: Authentication, Registration, and Call Routing

Over the past decade, multimedia services have gained significant acceptance and played an important role in the convergence of IP networks. Supporting mobility in IP (Internet Protocol) networks is a crucial step towards satisfying the nomadic communication paradigms on the current Internet. The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) presents one approach towards supporting IP mobility. Additionally, SIP is increasingly gaining in popularity as the next generation multimedia signaling and session establishment protocol. It is anticipated that the SIP infrastructure will be extensively deployed all over the Internet. In this paper, we explore an efficient approach to inter-domain SIP mobility in an attempt to improve personal and terminal mobility schemes. We succeed in applying a persistent identification framework to application level SIP addressing by introducing a level of indirection on top of the traditional SIP architecture. We refer to our approach as the Handle SIP (H-SIP). H-SIP leverages the current SIP architecture abstracting any domain binding from users. Our approach to mobility is user-controlled. We experimentally prove the efficiency of H-SIP in achieving inter-domain authentication and call routing through modeling and real-time measurements

A Mobile Transient Internet Architecture

This paper describes a new architecture for transient mobile networks destined to merge existing and future network architectures, communication implementations and protocol operations by introducing a new paradigm to data delivery and identification. The main goal of our research is to enable seamless end-to-end communication between mobile and stationary devices across multiple networks and through multiple communication environments. The architecture establishes a set of infrastructure components and protocols that set the ground for a Persistent Identification Network (PIN). The basis for the operation of PIN is an identification space consisting of unique location independent identifiers similar to the ones implemented in the Handle system. Persistent Identifiers are used to identify and locate Digital Entities which can include devices, services, users and even traffic. The architecture establishes a primary connection independent logical structure that can operate over conventional networks or more advanced peer-to-peer aggregation networks. Communication is based on routing pools and novel protocols for routing data across several abstraction levels of the network, regardless of the end-points’ current association and state. The architecture also postulates a new type of network referred to as the Green Network. The Green Network has protocols to coordinate routing traffic and to allow for the identification and authentication of devices, services, users and content characterized as Digital Entities. Transmission is assumed to initiate and terminate at transient physical locations. The network implements every reasonable effort to coordinate a prompt delivery to the transient end-points using whatever means available. This paper is a conceptual logical model of the intended architecture and specifics about its particular components and their implementations will be discussed in future papers

Efficient User Controlled Inter-Domain SIP Mobility Authentication, Registration, and Call Routing

Over the past decade, multimedia services have gained significant acceptance and played an important role in the convergence of IP networks. The proliferation of mobile devices and the nomadic user and computing lifestyles on current networks make mobility support a crucial ingredient of current IP-based multimedia systems. The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) presents one approach towards supporting IP mobility. Additionally, SIP is increasingly gaining in popularity as the next generation multimedia signaling and session establishment protocol, and the SIP infrastructure is anticipated to be extensively deployed all over the Internet. We have lately proposed an approach to inter-domain SIP mobility which we call H-SIP. H-SIP is a user-controlled mobility scheme that improves personal and terminal mobility. H-SIP uses persistent identifiers and leverages the traditional SIP architecture to abstract any domain binding from users. This paper expands on our previous work and experimentally proves the efficiency of H-SIP in achieving inter-domain authentication and call routing through modeling and real-time measurements

Bandwidth Optimal Pipeline Schedule for Collective Communication

We present a strongly polynomial-time algorithm to generate bandwidth optimal allgather/reduce-scatter on any network topology, with or without switches. Our algorithm constructs pipeline schedules achieving provably the best possible bandwidth performance on a given topology. To provide a universal solution, we model the network topology as a directed graph with heterogeneous link capacities and switches directly as vertices in the graph representation. The algorithm is strongly polynomial-time with respect to the topology size. This work heavily relies on previous graph theory work on edge-disjoint spanning trees and edge splitting. While we focus on allgather, the methods in this paper can be easily extended to generate schedules for reduce, broadcast, reduce-scatter, and allreduce