Dimitris Syrivelis

Pursuing a Software Defined Information-centric Network

The areas of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Information-Centric Networking (ICN) have gained increasing attention in the wider research community, while gaining credibility through corporate interest and investment. With the promise of SDN to simplify the deployment of alternative network architectures, the question arises how SDN and ICN could concretely be combined, deployed and tested. In this paper, we address this very question within a particular architectural context for ICN. We outline a possible realization in a novel design for ICN solutions and point to possible test bed deployments for future testing.

A Framework for Joint Network Coding and Transmission Rate Control in Wireless Networks

Network coding has been proposed as a technique that can potentially increase the transport capacity of a wireless network via processing and mixing of data packets at intermediate routers. However, most previous studies either assume a fixed transmission rate or do not consider the impact of using diverse rates on the network coding gain. Since in many cases, network coding implicitly relies on overhearing, the choice of the transmission rate has a big impact on the achievable gains. The use of higher rates works in favor of increasing the native throughput; however, it may in many cases work against effective overhearing. In other words, there is a tension between the achievable network coding gain and the inherent rate gain possible on a link. In this paper our goal is to drive the network towards achieving the best trade-off between these two contradictory effects. Towards this, we design a distributed framework that (a) facilitates the choice of the best rate on each link while considering the need for overhearing and (b) dictates the choice of which decoding recipient will acknowledge the reception of an encoded packet. We demonstrate that both of these features contribute significantly towards gains in throughput. We extensively simulate our framework in a variety of topological settings. We also fully implement it on real hardware and demonstrate its applicability and performance gains via proof-of-concept experiments on our wireless testbed. We show that our framework yields throughput gains of up to 390% as compared to what is achieved in a rate-unaware network coding framework.

Bits and coins: Supporting collaborative consumption of mobile internet

The recent mobile data explosion has increased the interest for mobile user-provided networks (MUPNs), where users share their Internet access by exploiting the diversity in their needs and resource availability. Although promising, MUPNs raise unique challenges. Namely, the success of such services relies on user participation which in turn can be achieved on the basis of a fair and efficient resource (i.e., Internet access and battery energy) exchange policy. The latter should be devised and imposed in a very fast time scale, based on near real-time feedback from mobile users regarding their needs, resources, and network conditions that are rapidly changing. To address these challenges we design and implement a novel cloud-controlled MUPN system, that employs software defined networking support on mobile terminals, to dynamically apply data forwarding policies with adaptive flow-control. We devise these policies by solving a coalitional game that is played among the users. We prove that the game has a non-empty core and hence the solution, which determines the servicing policy, incentivizes the users to participate. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the service in a prototype, where we investigate its performance limits, quantify the implementation overheads, and justify our architecture design choices.

FIJI: Fighting Implicit Jamming in 802.11 WLANs !

The IEEE 802.11 protocol inherently provides the same long-term throughput to all the clients associated with a given access point (AP). In this paper, we first identify a clever, low-power jamming attack that can take advantage of this behavioral trait: the placement of a low-power jammer in a way that it affects a single legitimate client can cause starvation to all the other clients. In other words, the total throughput provided by the corresponding AP is drastically degraded. To fight against this attack, we design FIJI, a cross-layer anti-jamming system that detects such intelligent jammers and mitigates their impact on network performance. FIJI looks for anomalies in the AP load distribution to efficiently perform jammer detection. It then makes decisions with regards to optimally shaping the traffic such that: (a) the clients that are not explicitly jammed are shielded from experiencing starvation and, (b) the jammed clients receive the maximum possible throughput under the given conditions. We implement FIJI in real hardware; we evaluate its efficacy through experiments on a large-scale indoor testbed, under different traffic scenarios, network densities and jammer locations. Our measurements suggest that FIJI detects such jammers in real-time and alleviates their impact by allocating the available bandwidth in a fair and efficient way.

A new slicing scheme for efficient use of wireless testbeds

The gradually growing need for testbed use so as networking algorithms to be validated in real environments, has given rise to optimal utilization of testbed resources. Despite the fact that, many laboratories around the globe have deployed testbeds, so as experimenters have the opportunity to test their algorithms, the majority of those testbeds suffer from bad management that prevents users from efficiently exploiting testbeds resources. Moreover, as the number of testbed users increases, experimenters needs for more sophisticated allocation of testbed resources are growing. Toward, this direction, we propose a managerial framework that exploits testbed utilization by introducing slicing over frequency spectrum. This new framework will allow a more sophisticated way to optimally control and manage network resources of a testbed. Labs website: http://nitlab.inf.uth.gr

Towards Maximizing Wireless Testbed Utilization Using Spectrum Slicing

As experimentation becomes one of the de-facto approaches for benchmarking, researchers are turning to testbeds to test, review and verify their work. As a result, several research laboratories build wireless testbeds, in order to offer their researchers a real environment to test their algorithms. As testbeds become more and more popular, the need for a managerial tool that will not only provide a unified way for defining and executing an experiment and collecting experimental results, but that will also serve as many users as possible maximizing the utilization of its resources, is growing. In this spirit, we propose a scheme that exploits wireless testbeds functionality by introducing spectrum slicing of the testbed resources. This scheme can be incorporated inside OMF, an already existing wireless testbeds managerial framework, which is widely used by many researchers.

TLQAP : a topology and link quality assessment protocol for efficient node allocation on wireless testbeds

In this paper we present Topology and Link Quality Assessment Protocol (TLQAP), which we have implemented as a wireless testbed management framework component, that is used to inspect link quality between wireless testbed nodes and appropriately map them to user experiment requirements. TLQAP is mainly an OSI layer 2 design for fixed location, non RF-isolated wireless testbed deployments, which assesses interconnection topology and link quality by estimating packet delivery ratio (PDR) and transmission delay at each node for all requested channel, rate and transmission power combinations. Moreover, TLQAP builds a measurement history log and creates a channel utilization profile, in the context of each testbed node, for all the nearby testbed-external devices that operate independently in the region and are not under the management framework control. The analysis of this information enables TLQAP to choose the channels that have the highest probability of being free during an experiment. TLQAP OSI layer 2 component has been implemented in the click modular router framework and the controller component has been integrated with OMF management framework for wireless testbeds. To outline TLQAP benefits, we have performed experiments on our ORBIT node testbed and we compare it to an existing application level measuring tool.

Wireless-Optical Network Convergence: Enabling the 5G Architecture to Support Operational and End-User Services

This article presents a converged 5G network infrastructure and an overarching architecture to jointly support operational network and end-user services, proposed by the EU 5G PPP project 5G-XHaul. The 5G-XHaul infrastructure adopts a common fronthaul/backhaul network solution, deploying a wealth of wireless technologies and a hybrid active/passive optical transport, supporting flexible fronthaul split options. This infrastructure is evaluated through a novel modeling. Numerical results indicate significant energy savings at the expense of increased end-user service delay.

Wireless network coding: Deciding when to flip the switch

Network coding has been shown to offer significant throughput benefits over store-and-forward routing in certain wireless network topologies. However, the application of network coding may not always improve the network performance. In this paper1, we provide a comprehensive analytical study, which helps in assessing when network coding is preferable to a traditional store-and-forward approach. Interestingly, our study reveals that in many topological scenarios, network coding can in fact hurt the throughput performance; in such scenarios, applying the store-and-forward approach leads to higher network throughput. We validate our analytical findings via extensive testbed experiments, and we extract guidelines on when network coding should be applied instead of store-and-forward.

A software framework for alleviating the effects of MAC-aware jamming attacks in wireless access networks

The IEEE 802.11 protocol inherently provides the same long-term throughput to all the clients associated with a given access point (AP). In this paper, we first identify a clever, low-power jamming attack that can take advantage of this behavioral trait: the placement of a low-power jammer in a way that it affects a single legitimate client can cause starvation to all the other clients. In other words, the total throughput provided by the corresponding AP is drastically degraded. To fight against this attack, we design FIJI, a cross-layer anti-jamming system that detects such intelligent jammers and mitigates their impact on network performance. FIJI looks for anomalies in the AP load distribution to efficiently perform jammer detection. It then makes decisions with regards to optimally shaping the traffic such that: (a) the clients that are not explicitly jammed are shielded from experiencing starvation and, (b) the jammed clients receive the maximum possible throughput under the given conditions. We implement FIJI in real hardware; we evaluate its efficacy through experiments on two wireless testbeds, under different traffic scenarios, network densities and jammer locations. We perform experiments both indoors and outdoors, and we consider both WLAN and mesh deployments. Our measurements suggest that FIJI detects such jammers in real-time and alleviates their impact by allocating the available bandwidth in a fair and efficient way.