Daniel Günther

German-lab experimental facility

The G-Lab project aims to investigate concepts and technologies for future networks in a practical manner. Thus G-Lab consists of two major fields of activities: research studies of future network components and the design and setup of experimental facilities. Both is controlled by the same community to ensure, that the experimental facility fits to the demand of researchers. Researchers gain access to virtualized resources or may gain exclusive access to resource if necessary. We present the current setup of the experimental facility, describing the available hardware, management of the platform, the utilization of the Planet-Lab software and the user management.

A building block interaction model for flexible future Internet architectures

Todays Internet has a static architecture that makes introducing new functionality a complex and costly task, so the Internet can not keep pace with rising demands and new network capabilities. Therefore, evolvability and flexibility are the keys to a future Internet architecture. In this paper we propose a building block interaction model that can be used to build highly flexible and evolvable network architectures. The paper also explains how the interaction model can be used as a basis for automatic protocol selection and composition.

A Requirement Aware Method to Reduce Complexity in Selecting and Composing Functional-Block-Based Protocol Graphs

Future Internet research activities try to increase the flexibility of the Internet. A well known approach is to build protocol graphs by connecting functional blocks together. The protocol graph that should be used is the one most suitable to the application’s requirements. To find the most suitable graph, all possible protocol graphs must be evaluated. However, the number of possible protocol graphs increases exponentially as the number of functional blocks increases. This paper presents a method of representing the protocol graph search space as a set of search trees and then uses forward pruning to reduce the number of protocol graphs evaluated. We evaluate our proposed method by simulation.

A Multistep Process Model for Selecting and Composing Functional Blocks in a Future Internet Architecture

Future Internet research activities try to increase the flexibility of the Internet. A well known approach in this area is to build protocol graphs by connecting functional blocks together. The protocol graph that should be used is the one most suitable to the applications requirements. This paper presents a Multistep Process Model to find the most suitable protocol graph. We evaluate our proposed method by conceptual review in combination with a defined evaluation scenario using loss reduction.

A way to identify decision criteria for selecting different mechanisms which provide reliable transmission in a Future Internet architecture

In the current rather rigid communication model on the Internet, the functional composition of available algorithms is dictated by the ISO/OSI stack model. A flexible architecture, as often discussed in the Future Internet research area, will be able to support the desire to dynamically choose certain mechanisms based on the requirements of a particular application at both design time and run time. Such a dynamic composition of algorithms needs not only a flexible architecture to combine methods, but also decision criteria to enable the automatic selection from a pool of mechanisms. We present a way to extrapolate the decision criteria with a simulated experimental environment. We will describe how our scenario is able to support an evaluation that will lead to the identification of the required decision criteria.

A method for producing requirement-specific protocol graphs in a flexible network architecture

Abstract Future-Internet research tries to improve the Internet in various ways. Functional-block-based approaches use flexible network stacks called protocol graphs which are created from functional blocks which encapsulate network functionalities. This article presents a method for producing requirement-specific protocol graphs which organizes the problem domain into the separate concerns of modeling functional blocks with impact functions, using those impact functions to evaluate the impact of a protocol graph, searching through the set of possible protocol graphs to select those protocol graphs which fulfill the requirements, and then reducing that set of protocol graphs to the most suitable one. Algorithms for the impact evaluation, search and selection, and optimization methods along with their relations are presented. An example is also presented to further clarify and describe our approach.