David A. Maltz

Dynamic source routing in ad hoc wireless networks

An ad hoc network is a collection of wireless mobile hosts forming a temporary network without the aid of any established infrastructure or centralized administration. In such an environment, it may be necessary for one mobile host to enlist the aid of other hosts in forwarding a packet to its destination, due to the limited range of each mobile host’s wireless transmissions. This paper presents a protocol for routing in ad hoc networks that uses dynamic source routing. The protocol adapts quickly to routing changes when host movement is frequent, yet requires little or no overhead during periods in which hosts move less frequently. Based on results from a packet-level simulation of mobile hosts operating in an ad hoc network, the protocol performs well over a variety of environmental conditions such as host density and movement rates. For all but the highest rates of host movement simulated, the overhead of the protocol is quite low, falling to just 1% of total data packets transmitted for moderate movement rates in a network of 24 mobile hosts. In all cases, the difference in length between the routes used and the optimal route lengths is negligible, and in most cases, route lengths are on average within a factor of 1.01 of optimal.

A performance comparison of multi-hop wireless ad hoc network routing protocols

An ad hoc networkis a collwtion of wirelessmobilenodes dynamically forminga temporarynetworkwithouttheuseof anyexistingnetworkirrfrastructureor centralizedadministration.Dueto the limitedtransmissionrange of ~vlrelessnenvorkinterfaces,multiplenetwork“hops”maybe neededfor onenodeto exchangedata ivithanotheracrox thenetwork.Inrecentyears, a ttiery of nelvroutingprotocols~geted specificallyat this environment havebeen developed.but little pcrfomrartwinformationon mch protocol and no ralistic performancecomparisonbehvwrrthem ISavailable. ~Is paper presentsthe results of a derailedpacket-levelsimulationcomparing fourmulti-hopwirelessad hoc networkroutingprotocolsthatcovera range of designchoices: DSDV,TORA, DSR and AODV. \Vehave extended the /~r-2networksimulatorto accuratelymodelthe MACandphysical-layer behaviorof the IEEE 802.1I wirelessLANstandard,includinga realistic wtrelesstransmissionchannelmodel, and present the resultsof simulations of net(vorksof 50 mobilenodes.

GroupLens: applying collaborative filtering to Usenet news

newsgroups carry a wide enough spread of messages to make most individuals consider Usenet news to be a high noise information resource. Furthermore, each user values a different set of messages. Both taste and prior knowledge are major factors in evaluating news articles. For example, readers of the rec.humor newsgroup, a group designed for jokes and other humorous postings, value articles based on whether they perceive them to be funny. Readers of technical groups, such as comp.lang.c11 value articles based on interest and usefulness to them—introductory questions and answers may be uninteresting to an expert C11 programmer just as debates over subtle and advanced language features may be useless to the novice. The combination of high volume and personal taste made Usenet news a promising candidate for collaborative filtering. More formally, we determined the potential predictive utility for Usenet news was very high. The GroupLens project started in 1992 and completed a pilot study at two sites to establish the feasibility of using collaborative filtering for Usenet news [8]. Several critical design decisions were made as part of that pilot study, including:

The cost of a cloud: research problems in data center networks

The data centers used to create cloud services represent a significant investment in capital outlay and ongoing costs. Accordingly, we first examine the costs of cloud service data centers today. The cost breakdown reveals the importance of optimizing work completed per dollar invested. Unfortunately, the resources inside the data centers often operate at low utilization due to resource stranding and fragmentation. To attack this first problem, we propose (1) increasing network agility, and (2) providing appropriate incentives to shape resource consumption. Second, we note that cloud service providers are building out geo-distributed networks of data centers. Geo-diversity lowers latency to users and increases reliability in the presence of an outage taking out an entire site. However, without appropriate design and management, these geo-diverse data center networks can raise the cost of providing service. Moreover, leveraging geo-diversity requires services be designed to benefit from it. To attack this problem, we propose (1) joint optimization of network and data center resources, and (2) new systems and mechanisms for geo-distributing state.

Network traffic characteristics of data centers in the wild

Although there is tremendous interest in designing improved networks for data centers, very little is known about the network-level traffic characteristics of data centers today. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study of the network traffic in 10 data centers belonging to three different categories, including university, enterprise campus, and cloud data centers. Our definition of cloud data centers includes not only data centers employed by large online service providers offering Internet-facing applications but also data centers used to host data-intensive (MapReduce style) applications). We collect and analyze SNMP statistics, topology and packet-level traces. We examine the range of applications deployed in these data centers and their placement, the flow-level and packet-level transmission properties of these applications, and their impact on network and link utilizations, congestion and packet drops. We describe the implications of the observed traffic patterns for data center internal traffic engineering as well as for recently proposed architectures for data center networks.

MSOCKS: an architecture for transport layer mobility

Mobile nodes of the future will be equiped with multiple network interfaces to take advantage of overlay networks, yet no current mobility systems provide full support for the simultaneous use of multiple interfaces. The need for such support arises when multiple connectivity options are available with different cost, coverage, latency and bandwidth characteristics, and applications want their data to flow over the interface that best matches the characteristics of the data. We present an architecture called transport layer mobility that allows mobile nodes to not only change their point of attachment to the Internet, but also to control which network interfaces are used for the different kinds of data leaving from and arriving at the mobile node. We implement our transport layer mobility scheme using a split connection proxy architecture and a new technique called TCP splice that gives split connection proxy systems the same end to-end semantics as normal TCP connections.

The effects of on-demand behavior in routing protocols for multihop wireless ad hoc networks

A number of different routing protocols proposed for use in multihop wireless ad hoc networks are based in whole or in part on what can be described as on-demand behavior. By on-demand behavior, we mean approaches based only on reaction to the offered traffic being handled by the routing protocol. In this paper, we analyze the use of on-demand behavior in such protocols, focusing on its effect on the routing protocols forwarding latency, overhead cost, and route caching correctness, drawing examples from detailed simulation of the dynamic source routing (DSR) protocol. We study the protocols behavior and the changes introduced by variations on some of the mechanisms that make up the protocol, examining which mechanisms have the greatest impact and exploring the tradeoffs that exist between them.

Towards highly reliable enterprise network services via inference of multi-level dependencies

Localizing the sources of performance problems in large enterprise networks is extremely challenging. Dependencies are numerous, complex and inherently multi-level, spanning hardware and software components across the network and the computing infrastructure. To exploit these dependencies for fast, accurate problem localization, we introduce an Inference Graph model, which is well-adapted to user-perceptible problems rooted in conditions giving rise to both partial service degradation and hard faults. Further, we introduce the Sherlock system to discover Inference Graphs in the operational enterprise, infer critical attributes, and then leverage the result to automatically detect and localize problems. To illuminate strengths and limitations of the approach, we provide results from a prototype deployment in a large enterprise network, as well as from testbed emulations and simulations. In particular, we find that taking into account multi-level structure leads to a 30% improvement in fault localization, as compared to two-level approaches.

Supporting hierarchy and heterogeneous interfaces in multi-hop wireless ad hoc networks

Much progress has been made toward solving the problem of routing packets inside an ad hoc network, but there are presently no complete proposals for connecting ad hoc networks together to form larger networks, or for integrating them with wired Internets. We describe a technique that allows a single ad hoc network to span across heterogeneous link layers. Using this technique, we can both integrate ad hoc networks into the hierarchical Internet and support the migration of mobile nodes from the Internet into and out of ad hoc networks via Mobile IP. Taken together, these solutions improve the scalability of flat ad hoc networks by introducing hierarchy, and they enable all nodes participating in the ad hoc network to be reachable from anywhere in the world. We have implemented each of the solutions in a real testbed of 8 nodes using the Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol. Generalizing our solutions, we describe several abstract scenarios and present our ideas for solving them.

Towards a next generation data center architecture: scalability and commoditization

Applications hosted in todays data centers suffer from internal fragmentation of resources, rigidity, and bandwidth constraints imposed by the architecture of the network connecting the data centers servers. Conventional architectures statically map web services to Ethernet VLANs, each constrained in size to a few hundred servers owing to control plane overheads. The IP routers used to span traffic across VLANs and the load balancers used to spray requests within a VLAN across servers are realized via expensive customized hardware and proprietary software. Bisection bandwidth is low, severly constraining distributed computation Further, the conventional architecture concentrates traffic in a few pieces of hardware that must be frequently upgraded and replaced to keep pace with demand - an approach that directly contradicts the prevailing philosophy in the rest of the data center, which is to scale out (adding more cheap components) rather than scale up (adding more power and complexity to a small number of expensive components). Commodity switching hardware is now becoming available with programmable control interfaces and with very high port speeds at very low port cost, making this the right time to redesign the data center networking infrastructure. In this paper, we describe monsoon, a new network architecture, which scales and commoditizes data center networking monsoon realizes a simple mesh-like architecture using programmable commodity layer-2 switches and servers. In order to scale to 100,000 servers or more,monsoon makes modifications to the control plane (e.g., source routing) and to the data plane (e.g., hot-spot free multipath routing via Valiant Load Balancing). It disaggregates the function of load balancing into a group of regular servers, with the result that load balancing server hardware can be distributed amongst racks in the data center leading to greater agility and less fragmentation. The architecture creates a huge, flexible switching domain, supporting any server/any service and unfragmented server capacity at low cost.