Roughan, M.

Uhlig, S.

Willinger, W.

IEEE Network

Adelaide Research &amp; Scholarship

                      Copyright © 2008 IEEE.  Reprinted from IEEE Network, 2008; 22 (2):4-5  This material is posted here with permission of the IEEE. Such permission of the IEEE does not in any way imply IEEE endorsement of any of the University of Adelaide's products or services.  Internal or personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution must be obtained from the IEEE by writing to pubs-permissions@ieee.org.  By choosing to view this document, you agree to all provisions of the copyright laws protecting it.   IEEE Network • March/April 20084GUEST EDITORIALhe modern Internet is a large-scale distributed sys-tem composed of many complex interoperatingentities: traffic, topology, routing, addressing, andmore. With its continued growth, scalability has become anincreasingly important issue, as has the nature of the com-plex interactions between these entities. The current Inter-net architecture suffers from scalability problems indifferent respects: growth in traffic, topological size, multi-homing, and complex interactions across the TCP/IP proto-col stack are all stressing the current infrastructure. Theevolution of multihoming impacts both the behavior oftraffic and the routing plane. The deployment of IPv6 andnode mobility might also fundamentally change how trafficand routing behaves in the future. Understanding any ofthese aspects requires a thorough study of the relationshipsbetween them. Obviously, we cannot expect to cover in asingle special issue of IEEE Network all aspects of Internetscalability. In this issue we gather contributions that dealwith routing, naming, attacks against hosts and routers,and, finally, its topology.In recent years the exponential growth of the number ofInternet users with increased bandwidth demands has ledto the emergence of the next generation of IP routers. Dis-tributed architectures are a promising trend, providingpetabit routers with huge switching capacity and high-speedinterfaces. Distributed routers are designed with an opticalswitch fabric interconnecting line and control cards. Com-puting and memory resources are available on both controland line cards in order to perform routing and forwardingtasks. These new hardware architectures are not efficientlyutilized by the traditional software models where a singlecontrol card is responsible for all routing and managementoperations. The routing table manager (RTM) plays ahighly critical role by managing routing information and, inparticular, a forwarding information table (FIT). In “ADistributed and Scalable Routing Table Manager for NextGeneration IP Router” Nguyen, Jaumard, and Agarwalpresent a distributed architecture set up around a distribut-ed and scalable RTM that also provides improvements inrobustness and resiliency.Today’s Internet would be more efficient and robust ifrouters could flexibly divide traffic over multiple paths.Often, having just a few alternate paths is sufficient forcustomizing paths for different applications, improvingsecurity, reacting to failures, and balancing load. Yetalternate paths are often unavailable due to two barriers.First, in a network the size of the Internet, moving to flex-ible multipath routing can impose significant computa-tional and storage overhead on routers. Second, theindependent networks that make up the Internet will notrelinquish control over the flow of traffic without appro-priate incentives. In “Toward Internet-Wide MultipathRouting” He and Rexford survey flexible multipath rout-ing techniques that are both scalable and incentive-com-patible. Techniques covered include multihoming,tagging, tunneling, and extensions to existing Internetrouting protocols.A fundamental building block of the Internet is the nam-ing system. The Domain Name System (DNS) is the globallookup service for network resources. To protect DNSinformation, the DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) havebeen developed and deployed on branches of the DNS toprovide authentication and integrity protection using digitalsignatures. However, signed DNS nodes have been foundto have an unfortunate side effect: an attacker can querythem as reconnaissance before attacking hosts on a particu-lar network. There are different ways a zone administratorcan minimize information leakage while still taking advan-tage of DNSSEC for integrity and source authentication. In“Minimizing Information Leakage in the DNS” Rose andNakassis describe the risk, examine the protocol and opera-tional options, and look at their advantages and drawbacks.Internet Scalability: Properties and EvolutionMatthew Roughan TSteve Uhlig Walter WillingerLYT-GSTEDIT-MAR  3/6/08  1:49 PM  Page 4                 Authorized licensed use limited to: University of Adelaide Library. Downloaded on April 7, 2009 at 03:05 from IEEE Xplore.  Restrictions apply.IEEE Network • March/April 2008 5While attacks against the DNS can be particularlydisruptive to large numbers of nodes, traffic surgesdue to worm attacks are able to partially disrupt rout-ing. Two of the articles in this issue are related to thespread of worms and detecting compromised routers.Through modeling, Debany considers in “Modelingthe  Spread  of  Internet  Worms v ia  Pers i s tent lyUnpatched Hosts” the effects of Internet worms onpersistently unpatched hosts and hosts for which vul-nerabi l i t ies  are  re f reshed.  Current  models  haveassumed that all hosts transition through the same setof states. Debany goes beyond this simplification ofhost behavior by allowing hosts to have inherently dif-ferent characterist ics .  Equil ibrium condit ions areobtained under which an Internet worm will self-prop-agate indefinitely, which leads to thresholds belowwhich worms will become extinct.While compromising hosts is now very common forvarious purposes (e.g., bots, spyware, spam forwarding),attacks against routers are far less appreciated. The cen-tral role of routers in end-to-end communication makesit possible to leverage them for eavesdropping, man-in-the-middle, and denial-of-service attacks. In response, arange of specialized anomaly-detection protocols hasbeen proposed to detect misbehaving packet forwardingbetween routers. Mizrak, Mazrullo, and Savage discuss in“Detecting Compromised Routers via Packet ForwardingBehavior” the detection of misbehav-ing packet forwarding betweenrouters. The article describes a gen-eral framework for understanding theavailable design space and reviewsthe capabilities of various detectionprotocols.Last but not least, in “NetworkModels with a ‘Soft Hierarchy’: ARandom Graph Construction withLoglog Scalability” Norros and Reittuare concerned with the scalability oftopologies in general and Internet-liketopologies in particular. Many graphmodels have been proposed todescribe the Internet’s topology at theIP or autonomous system level, mostof them having power-law nodedegrees. The article discusses how aspecial class of very simple networkmodels, random graphs with infinitevariance power law degree, have fea-tures that may or may not be desirablefrom an Internet perspective. The pro-posed random graphs exhibit loglogscalability and possess a fascinatingarchitecture with a softly hierarchicalcore network.Finally, we would like to thank theLiaison Editor, Professor KazemSohraby, for helping in the final stepsof the reviewing process, as well as theexternal reviewers for their valuabletime.BiographiesMATTHEW ROUGHAN (mat thew.roughan@adelaide.edu.au) joined the School of Applied Mathematics at the University of Adelaidein February 2004, where he is interested in the area of design and installationof Internet measurement equipment, and the analysis and modeling of Internetmeasurement data. He previously worked in this area for four years at AT&T,and at Ericsson in Australia (via the Universities of Melbourne, and the RoyalMelbourne Institute for Technology) for another four. Prior to this, he worked atthe Cooperative Research Centre for Sensor Signal and Information Processing(CSSIP), Adelaide, Australia, on diverse projects ranging from the analysis ofionograms to land-mine detection. He gained his Ph.D. from the University ofAdelaide in 1994 in applied mathematics, and has now returned to the same depart-ment to teach.STEVE UHLIG (S.P.W.G.Uhlig@tudelft.nl) received a Ph.D. degree in applied sci-ences from the University of Louvain-la-neuve, Belgium, in March 2004, oninterdomain traffic engineering. He received the 2005 IBM/F.N.R.S. prize forhis Ph.D. thesis. From 2004 to 2006 he was a postdoctoral fellow of the BelgianNational Fund for Scientific Research. In October 2006 he joined the Network Archi-tecture and Services group of the Technical University of Delft as an assistantprofessor. His research interests include interdomain routing, traffic engineering andcharacterization, and Internet measurements.WALTER WILLINGER [F’05] (walter@research.att.com) received a Dipl.Math. from ETHZurich, Switzerland, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the School of ORIE, Cor-nell University, Ithaca, New York. He is currently a member of the Informationand Software Systems Research Center at AT&T Labs -Research, Florham Park,New Jersey, and before that was a member of technical staff at Bellcore AppliedResearch (1986–1996). His research interests include studying the multiscale natureof Internet traffic and topology, and developing a theoretical foundation fordealing with large-scale communication networks such as the Internet. He is aFellow of ACM (2005). For his work on the self-similar (“fractal”) nature ofInternet traffic, he received the 1996 IEEE W.R.G. Baker Prize Award, the 1994W.R. Bennett Prize Paper Award, and the 2005 ACM/SIGCOMM “Test ofTime” Paper Award.GUEST EDITORIALLYT-GSTEDIT-MAR  3/6/08  1:49 PM  Page 5       Authorized licensed use limited to: University of Adelaide Library. Downloaded on April 7, 2009 at 03:05 from IEEE Xplore.  Restrictions apply.

Internet scalability: properties and evolution

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Internet scalability: properties and evolution

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Internet scalability: properties and evolution

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Adelaide Research & Scholarship