Ahmad I

NPP: a facility based computation framework for restoration routing using aggregate link usage information

We present NPP – a new framework for online routing of bandwidth guaranteed paths with local restoration. NPP relies on the propagation of only aggregate link usage information [2,9] through routing protocols. The key advantage of NPP is that it delivers the bandwidth sharing performance achieved by propagating complete per path link usage information [9], while incurring significantly reduced routing protocol overhead. We specify precise implementation models for the restoration routing frameworks presented in [1] and [2] and compare their traffic placement characteristics with those of NPP. Simulation results show that NPP performs significantly better in terms of number of LSPs accepted and total bandwidth placed on the network. For 1000 randomly selected LSP requests on a 20-node homogenous ISP network [8], NPP accepts 775 requests on average compared to 573 requests accepted by the framework of [2] and 693 requests accepted by the framework of [1]. Experiments with different sets of LSP requests and on other networks indicate that NPP results in similar performance gains.

Clustering IP addresses using longest prefix matching and nearest neighbor algorithms

This paper summarizes a new algorithm for clustering IP addresses. Unlike popular clustering algorithms such as k-means and DBSCAN, this algorithm is designed specifically for IP addresses. In particular, the algorithm employs the longest prefix match as a similarity metric and uses an adaptation of the nearest neighbor algorithm for search to yield meaningful clusters. The algorithm is automatic in that it does not require any input parameters. When applied to a large IP address dataset, the algorithm produced 90% correct clusters. Correct cluster analysis is essential for many network design and management tasks including design of web caches and server replications.