Building a Standard Measurement Platform

Network management is achieved through a large number of disparate solutions for different technologies and parts of the end-to-end network. Gaining an overall view, and especially predicting the impact on a service user, is difficult. Recently, a number of proprietary platforms have emerged to conduct end-to-end testing from user premises; however, these are limited in scale, interoperability, and the ability to compare like-for-like results. In this article we show that these platforms share similar architectures and can benefit from the standardization of key interfaces, test definitions, information model, and protocols. We take the SamKnows platform as a use case and propose an evolution from its current proprietary protocols to standardized protocols and tests. In particular, we propose to use extensions of the IETF's IPFIX and NETCONF/YANG in the platform. Standardization will allow measurement capabilities to be included on many more network elements and user devices, providing a much more comprehensive view of user experience and enabling problems and performance bottlenecks to be identified and addressed.Publicad

A Data Fusion Framework for Large-Scale Measurement Platforms

The need to assess internet performance from the user’s perspective grows, as does the interest in deployment of Large-Scale Measurement Platforms (LMAPs). The potential of these platforms as a real-time network diagnostic tool is limited by the volume, velocity and variety of the data they generated. Fusing this data from multiple sources and generating a single piece of coherent information about the state of the network would increase the efficiency of network monitoring. The current practice of visually analysing LMAPs’ data stream would certainly benefit from having automatically generated notifications in a timely manner alerting human controllers to the network’s conditions of interest. This paper proposed a data fusion framework for LMAPs that makes use of mathematical distribution based sensors to generate probabilistic sensor outputs which are fused using a Dempster- Shafer Theory

Industry-Academia Research toward Future Network Intelligence:The NG-CDI Prosperity Partnership

Ever since the first automation provided by the introduction of the Strowger telephone exchange in the late 19th century, networks have been increas- ingly automated. Fast forward to 2022, and the challenge facing network providers is scaling up this level of automation considering massive increases in complexity, new levels of agility to operate ser- vices, and rising demand from customers within the modern telecommunications ecosystem. This article describes a significant new industry-academia part- nership to address these challenges: Next Gener- ation Converged Digital Infrastructure (NG-CDI) is creating a vision for the building and operation of a future-proof network infrastructure and its autonomic management. In this article, we high- light three exemplar activities within the NG-CDI research program that illustrate the benefits of tak- ing a highly collaborative interdisciplinary approach and show how academia and industry working closely together have delivered a range of direct and positive impacts on business

Generic Announcement Protocol for Event Messaging

We describe the Generic Announcement Protocol (GAP), a two-tier generic multicast transport designed for scalable event notification. GAP requires no extra central infrastructure or administration beyond a multicast enabled network or an equivalent overlay. GAP’s scalability arises from the use of announcement indexes, which exploit the underlying openness and flexibility of the raw GAP protocol. Event notifications can be massively multiplexed onto a multicast group channel, with interested receivers only joining the group for the brief duration of the announcement, coordinated by an acyclic graph of indexes, which are themselves announcements on other channels. This indexing technique, combined with the GAP protocol is particularly efficient when waiting for events to occur, since the network resources (for addressing and filtering) are kept to a minimum.

Generic Announcement Protocol for Event Messaging

We describe the Generic Announcement Protocol (GAP), a two-tier generic multicast transport designed for scalable event notification. GAP requires no extra central infrastructure or administration beyond a multicast enabled network or an equivalent overlay. GAP’s scalability arises from the use of announcement indexes, which exploit the underlying openness and flexibility of the raw GAP protocol. Event notifications can be massively multiplexed onto a multicast group channel, with interested receivers only joining the group for the brief duration of the announcement, coordinated by an acyclic graph of indexes, which are themselves announcements on other channels. This indexing technique, combined with the GAP protocol is particularly efficient when waiting for events to occur, since the network resources (for addressing and filtering) are kept to a minimum.

Industry-Academia Research towards Future Network Intelligence: The NG-CDI Prosperity Partnership

Ever since the first automation provided by the introduction of the Strowger telephone exchange in the late 19th century, networks have been increasingly automated. Fast forward to 2022, and the challenge facing network providers is scaling up this level of automation considering massive increases in complexity, new levels of agility to operate services, and rising demand from customers within the modern telecommunications ecosystem. This paper describes a significant new industryacademia partnership to address these challenges: Next Generation Converged Digital Infrastructure (NG-CDI) is creating a vision for the building and operation of a futureproof network infrastructure and its autonomic management. In this paper we highlight three exemplar activities within the NG-CDI research programme that illustrate the benefits of taking a highly collaborative interdisciplinary approach and show how academia and industry working closely together has delivered a range of direct and positive impacts on the business