NETWORK PROGRAMMING FOR PERFORMANCE AND LIVENESS MONITORING IN SEGMENT ROUTING NETWORKS

Techniques are described herein to define network programming functions for performance and liveness monitoring in Segment Routing (SR) and SRv6 networks. The network programming functions enable probe messages to run at significantly faster rates as punting probe messages to the control plane (slow path processing) and re-injecting them are not required. This enables hardware offloading for Performance Measurement (PM) sessions as well with liveness and PM probes combined. Network programming labels may be allocated from the global SR Global Block (SRGB) for SR Multiprotocol Label Switching (SR-MPLS) by a Software Defined Networking (SDN) controller. END functions are defined for SRv6 for performance delay, loss and liveness monitoring

ASIC-FRIENDLY SRV6-BASED SD-WAN SERVICE THEFT PREVENTION MECHANISM

Presented herein is a security mechanism that prevents service theft with software-defined networking in a wide area network (SD-WAN) services provided with Segment Routing over IPv6 dataplane (SRv6). The security mechanism described herein is valid in SRv6 deployments, but also provides line-rate security at PEs that do not have dedicated crypto-hardware

SDN Architecture and Southbound APIs for IPv6 Segment Routing Enabled Wide Area Networks

The SRv6 architecture (Segment Routing based on IPv6 data plane) is a promising solution to support services like Traffic Engineering, Service Function Chaining and Virtual Private Networks in IPv6 backbones and datacenters. The SRv6 architecture has interesting scalability properties as it reduces the amount of state information that needs to be configured in the nodes to support the network services. In this paper, we describe the advantages of complementing the SRv6 technology with an SDN based approach in backbone networks. We discuss the architecture of a SRv6 enabled network based on Linux nodes. In addition, we present the design and implementation of the Southbound API between the SDN controller and the SRv6 device. We have defined a data-model and four different implementations of the API, respectively based on gRPC, REST, NETCONF and remote Command Line Interface (CLI). Since it is important to support both the development and testing aspects we have realized an Intent based emulation system to build realistic and reproducible experiments. This collection of tools automate most of the configuration aspects relieving the experimenter from a significant effort. Finally, we have realized an evaluation of some performance aspects of our architecture and of the different variants of the Southbound APIs and we have analyzed the effects of the configuration updates in the SRv6 enabled nodes

AN ADOPTIVE AND RESILIENT SEGMENT ROUTING VERSION 6 POLICY TO ADDRESS TIGHT SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENT REQUIREMENTS IN 5G NETWORKS

There is ongoing work positioning Segment Routing version 6 (SRv6) as a replacement to General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) Tunneling Protocol User Plane (GTP-U). The main benefits of using SRv6 include coupling of the mobility overlay with the underlay (transport Traffic Engineering (TE)) and service chaining (GiLAN) and reusing high performance routers with SRv6 capabilities as User Plane Functions (UPFs). Techniques are described herein for enabling the creation of specific network slices where in the underlay a high resiliency is achieved with zero packet loss for tight Service Level Agreement (SLA) enterprise premium traffic. This same mechanism may be reused for path monitoring (e.g., latency, jitter, etc.) using in-band mechanisms for Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communications (URLLC)

STRUCTURED FLOW LABEL

This proposal provides a technique to restructure a Flow Label into 4-bits of per‑flow flags and 16-bits of entropy within controlled domains. In various implementations, the flags may be used for performance information, Operations, Administration, and Maintenance (OAM), or the like. This proposal may allow providing a premium service on top of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6)

BORDER GATEWAY PROTOCOL NETWORK LAYER REACHABILITY INFORMATION NON-KEY DATA EXCHANGE

Techniques are described herein for encoding non-key data along with each Network Layer Reachability Information (NLRI) packed in a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Update message. This may be useful to increase the NLRI packing efficiency of the Update message when the NLRIs have unique path information associated therewith, or when only a subset of NLRIs have some path information associated therewith. A number of use cases may be employed to take advantage of this mechanism

Segment Routing: a Comprehensive Survey of Research Activities, Standardization Efforts and Implementation Results

Fixed and mobile telecom operators, enterprise network operators and cloud providers strive to face the challenging demands coming from the evolution of IP networks (e.g. huge bandwidth requirements, integration of billions of devices and millions of services in the cloud). Proposed in the early 2010s, Segment Routing (SR) architecture helps face these challenging demands, and it is currently being adopted and deployed. SR architecture is based on the concept of source routing and has interesting scalability properties, as it dramatically reduces the amount of state information to be configured in the core nodes to support complex services. SR architecture was first implemented with the MPLS dataplane and then, quite recently, with the IPv6 dataplane (SRv6). IPv6 SR architecture (SRv6) has been extended from the simple steering of packets across nodes to a general network programming approach, making it very suitable for use cases such as Service Function Chaining and Network Function Virtualization. In this paper we present a tutorial and a comprehensive survey on SR technology, analyzing standardization efforts, patents, research activities and implementation results. We start with an introduction on the motivations for Segment Routing and an overview of its evolution and standardization. Then, we provide a tutorial on Segment Routing technology, with a focus on the novel SRv6 solution. We discuss the standardization efforts and the patents providing details on the most important documents and mentioning other ongoing activities. We then thoroughly analyze research activities according to a taxonomy. We have identified 8 main categories during our analysis of the current state of play: Monitoring, Traffic Engineering, Failure Recovery, Centrally Controlled Architectures, Path Encoding, Network Programming, Performance Evaluation and Miscellaneous...Comment: SUBMITTED TO IEEE COMMUNICATIONS SURVEYS & TUTORIAL

SEGMENT ROUTING POLICIES WITH BUILT-IN RESILIENCY

Techniques are described herein to establish hierarchical Segment Routing (SR) policies with built-in resiliency. These techniques increase the scalability of the SR Path Computation Element (PCE) and SR network. Specifically, once such policies are installed by the SR PCE, the SR PCE does not have to take any action in the event of failure. This is an improvement over current approaches, which employ the SR head-end node as a single point of failure

A Local Approach to Fast Failure Recovery of LISP Ingress Tunnel Routers

Part 8: LISP and Multi-domain RoutingInternational audienceLISP (Locator/ID Separation Protocol) has been proposed as a future Internet architecture in order to solve the scalability issues the current architecture is facing. LISP tunnels packets between border routers, which are the locators of the non-globally routable identifiers associated to end-hosts. In this context, the encapsulating routers, which are called Ingress Tunnel Routers (ITR) and learn dynamically identifier-to-locators mappings needed for the encapsulation, can cause severe and long lasting traffic disruption upon failure. In this paper, thanks to real traffic traces, we first explore the impact of ITR failures on ongoing traffic. Our measurements confirm that the failure of an ITR can have severe impact on traffic. We then propose and evaluate an ITR synchronization mechanism to locally protect ITRs, achieving disruptionless traffic redirection. We finally explore how to minimize the number of ITRs to synchronize in large networks