Randomized Packet Filtering through Specialized Partitioning of Rulesets

A key issue in high speed traffic processing is to immediately detect potentially interesting packets. At very high speed, this operation is particularly crucial as filtering packets close to the wire relieves real applications from handling large volumes of (uninteresting) data. This paper proposes a fast and randomized approach to packet filtering based on partitioning rule databases for their storage in fast and compact Bloom filters that can be placed in fast cache memory. Database partitioning is obtained by a specially tailored clustering algorithm and the results show that even large rulesets can be divided into a limited number of partitions and accommodated in reasonably small Bloom filters

Enif-lang: A specialized language for programming network functions on commodity hardware

The maturity level reached by today’s commodity platforms makes even low-cost PCs viable alternatives to dedicated hardware to implement real network functions without sacrificing performance. Indeed, the availability of multi-core processing packages and multi-queue network interfaces that can be managed by accelerated I/O frameworks, provides off-the-shelf servers with the necessary power capability for running a broad variety of network applications with near hardware-class performance. At the same time, the introduction of the Software Defined Networks (SDN) and the Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) paradigms call for new programming abstractions and tools to allow this new class of network devices to be flexibly configured and functionally repurposed from the network control plane. The paper presents the ongoing work towards Enif-Lang (Enhanced Network processIng Functional Language), a functional language for programming network functions over generic middleboxes running the Linux operating system. The language addresses concurrent programming by design and is targeted at developing simple stand-alone applications as well as pre-processing stages of packet elaborations. Enif-Lang is implemented as a Domain Specific Language embedded in the Haskell language and inherits the main principles of its ancestor, including the strong typedness and the concept of function compositions. Complex network functions are implemented by composing a set of elementary operations (primitives) by means of a compact yet expressive language grammar. Throughout the paper, the description of the design principles and features of Enif-Lang are accompanied by examples and use cases. In addition, a preliminary performance assessment is carried out to prove the effectiveness of the language for developing practical applications with the performance level required by 5G systems and the Tactile Internet

Network Traffic Processing with PFQ

This paper presents Packet Family Queue (PFQ), a high-performance framework for packet processing designed to flexibly handle network applications parallelism and making traffic processing safe and easy. PFQ is an open-source module for the Linux kernel that combines software-accelerated packet I/O to in-kernel early stage packet processing and fine-grained distribution to network applications and physical devices. PFQ does not require any modification to network device drivers and exposes programming interfaces to multi-threaded applications natively designed to run on top of it, as well as to legacy monitoring tools using the pcap library. The results show that the flexibility and the backward compatibility provided by PFQ do not impact its processing performance that, in fact, reaches line rate figures in the cases of pure speed tests and real practical monitoring use cases on 10+ Gb/s links

Packet Fan-Out Extension for the pcap Library

The large availability of multi-gigabit network cards for commodity PCs requires network applications to potentially cope with high volumes of traffic. However, computation intensive operations may not catch up with high traffic rates and need to be run in parallel over multiple processing cores. As of today, the vast majority of network applications - e.g., monitoring and IDS systems - are still based on the pcap library interface which, unfortunately, does not provide the native multi-core support, even though the current underlying capture technologies do. This paper introduces a novel version of the pcap library for the Linux operating system that enables transparent application level parallelism. The new library supports fan-out operations for both multi-threaded and multi-process applications, by means of extended API as well as by a declarative grammar for configuration files, suitable for legacy applications. In addition, the library can transparently run on top of the standard Linux socket as well as on other accelerated active engines. Performance evaluation has been carried out on a multi-core architecture in pure capture tests and in more realistic use cases involving monitoring applications such as Tstat and Bro, with standard Linux socket as well as PFRING and PFQ accelerated engines

The impact of the access point power model on the energy-efficient management of infrastructured wireless LANs

The reduction of the energy footprint of large and mid-sized IEEE 802.11 access networks is gaining momentum. When operating at the network management level, the availability of an accurate power model of the APs becomes of paramount importance, because different detail levels have a non-negligible impact on the performance of the optimisation algorithms. The literature is plentiful of AP power models, and choosing the right one is not an easy task. In this paper we report the outcome of a thorough study on the impact that various inflections of the AP power model have when minimising the energy consumption of the infrastructure side of an enterprise wireless LAN. Our study, performed on several network scenarios and for various device energy profiles, reveals that simple one- and two-component models can provide excellent results in practically all cases. Conversely, employing accurate and detailed power models rarely offers substantial advantages in terms of power reduction, but, on the other hand, makes the solving algorithms much slower to execute

A Review of Low-end, Middle-end and High-end IoT Devices

Internet of Things (IoT) devices play a crucial role in the overall development of IoT in providing countless applications in various areas. Due to the increasing interest and rapid technological growth of sensor technology, which have certainly revolutionized the way we live today, a need to provide a detailed analysis of the embedded platforms and boards is consequential. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the recent and most-widely used commercial and research embedded systems and boards in different classification emphasizing their key attributes including processing and memory capabilities, security features, connectivity and communication interfaces, size, cost and appearance, operating system (OS) support, power specifications and battery life and listing some interesting projects for each device. Through this exploration and discussion, readers can have an overall understanding on this area and foster more subsequent studies

Modeling RACH Arrivals and Collisions for Human-Type Communication

This letter proposes an analytical model to evaluate the collision probability on the Random-Access CHannel (RACH) in Long-Term Evolution systems as a function of the number of user equipment, the number of available preambles, and the Inter-arrival times of the RACH Requests (IRRs) of the average user. The model for the IRR of the average user is obtained from real traffic data captured at the eNodeB of a mobile operator, and is derived by emulating the radio resource control (RRC) state machine for different RRCs Inactivity timer (RRCIT) settings. The results of this letter suggest that when RRCIT is set to a few seconds, a mixture model is more accurate than the Poisson hypothesis both in modeling the IRR and in estimating the RACH performance

Enhancing counting bloom filters through Huffman-coded multilayer structures

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Experimental Analysis of ViLTE Service

Long-term evolution (LTE) is a broadband wireless cellular system currently available in about 200 countries. From the mobile network operator point of view, one of the most appealing characteristics of LTE is the possibility of providing the users with mobile broadband services like voice over LTE and video over LTE (ViLTE), with strict quality of service (QoS) guarantees. The success of such services, which usually require a subscription fee, is obviously tightly bound to the users' quality of experience (QoE), that must be significantly better than the quality perceived in case of free services. This paper attempts to evaluate the perceived quality of the ViLTE service. In more detail, we present the results of an experimental test–bed realised at one of the most popular italian MNO, aimed at evaluating the impact of several network layer QoS parameters on the QoE of the ViLTE service