Intra-Domain Pathlet Routing

Internal routing inside an ISP network is the foundation for lots of services that generate revenue from the ISP's customers. A fine-grained control of paths taken by network traffic once it enters the ISP's network is therefore a crucial means to achieve a top-quality offer and, equally important, to enforce SLAs. Many widespread network technologies and approaches (most notably, MPLS) offer limited (e.g., with RSVP-TE), tricky (e.g., with OSPF metrics), or no control on internal routing paths. On the other hand, recent advances in the research community are a good starting point to address this shortcoming, but miss elements that would enable their applicability in an ISP's network. We extend pathlet routing by introducing a new control plane for internal routing that has the following qualities: it is designed to operate in the internal network of an ISP; it enables fine-grained management of network paths with suitable configuration primitives; it is scalable because routing changes are only propagated to the network portion that is affected by the changes; it supports independent configuration of specific network portions without the need to know the configuration of the whole network; it is robust thanks to the adoption of multipath routing; it supports the enforcement of QoS levels; it is independent of the specific data plane used in the ISP's network; it can be incrementally deployed and it can nicely coexist with other control planes. Besides formally introducing the algorithms and messages of our control plane, we propose an experimental validation in the simulation framework OMNeT++ that we use to assess the effectiveness and scalability of our approach.Comment: 13 figures, 1 tabl

A framework for multi‐provider virtual private networks in software‐defined federated networks

Federated networks represent a remunerable operational way, allowing federated partners to increase their incomes through a sharing resource process. They have been primarily used in the context of cloud computing; nowadays, they are also used to provide connectivity services, like virtual private networks. However, providing such a service by using standard technologies in federated networks requires a nonnegligible effort from different points of view (e.g., configuration effort). In this paper, we propose an software‐defined network (SDN)–based framework aiming at overcoming limitations in currently adopted best practices to issue virtual private networks in federated networks. Relying on the SDN architecture, we propose a method allowing federated providers to quickly and easily create federated networks, reducing unneeded costs (e.g., new hardware), and a way for customers to fast‐access federated services, without any explicit actions from providers. We evaluate our framework by using SDNetkit. We focus on analyzing the impact of our implementation on both control and data plane, in terms of number of control messages exchanged in the network and size of the forwarding tables, respectively.BMBF, 01IS18025A, Verbundprojekt BIFOLD-BBDC: Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and DataBMBF, 01IS18037A, Verbundprojekt BIFOLD-BZML: Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and DataTU Berlin, Open-Access-Mittel – 202

Rethinking Virtual Private Networks in the Software-Defined Era

Abstract-Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) have seen an unparalleled increasing adoption in the last decade. Although their flexibility as transport technology and their effectiveness for traffic engineering are well recognized, VPNs are difficult to set up and manage, due to the complexity of configurations, to the number of involved protocols, and to the limited control and predictability of network behaviors. On the other hand, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a consolidated, yet still emerging paradigm by which the control plane logic of a network device is implemented by an arbitrarily programmed software that runs outside the device itself. We conjugate the effectiveness of traditional VPNs with the programmability of SDN, proposing a novel and improved realization of MPLS VPNs based on SDN. With our approach, provisioning and setup of VPNs are accomplished by using a simple and flexible configuration language. Management and troubleshooting are facilitated because only a minimal set of technologies (notably, just MPLS) is retained. Control and predictability of network behaviors are enhanced by the centralized coordination enforced by the SDN controller. Besides illustrating our proposed approach and specifying the configuration language, we describe a prototype implementation of a controller and the outcome of tests we conducted in several configuration scenarios