Dino Farinacci

The PIM architecture for wide-area multicast routing

The purpose of multicast routing is to reduce the communication costs for applications that send the same data to multiple recipients. Existing multicast routing mechanisms were intended for use within regions where a group is widely represented or bandwidth is universally plentiful. When group members, and senders to those group members, are distributed sparsely across a wide area, these schemes are not efficient; data packets or membership report information are occasionally sent over many links that do not lead to receivers or senders, respectively. We have developed a multicast routing architecture that efficiently establishes distribution trees across wide area internets, where many groups will be sparsely represented. Efficiency is measured in terms of the router state, control message processing, and data packet processing, required across the entire network in order to deliver data packets to the members of the group. Our protocol independent multicast (PIM) architecture: (a) maintains the traditional IP multicast service model of receiver-initiated membership, (b) supports both shared and source-specific (shortest-path) distribution trees, (c) is not dependent on a specific unicast routing protocol, and (d) uses soft-state mechanisms to adapt to underlying network conditions and group dynamics. The robustness, flexibility, and scaling properties of this architecture make it well-suited to large heterogeneous internetworks.

An architecture for wide-area multicast routing

Existing multicast routing mechanisms were intended for use within regions where a group is widely represented or bandwidth is universally plentiful. When group members, and senders to those group members, are distributed sparsely across a wide area, these schemes are not efficient; data packets or membership report information are occasionally sent over many links that do not lead to receivers or senders, respectively. We have developed a multicast routing architecture that efficiently establishes distribution trees across wide area internets, where many groups will be sparsely represented. Efficiency is measured in terms of the state, control message processing, and data packet processing, required across the entire network in order to deliver data packets to the members of the group. Our Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM) architecture: (a) maintains the traditional IP multicast service model of receiver-initiated membership; (b) can be configured to adapt to different multicast group and network characteristics; (c) is not dependent on a specific unicast routing protocol; and (d) uses soft-state mechanisms to adapt to underlying network conditions and group dynamics. The robustness, flexibility, and scaling properties of this architecture make it well suited to large heterogeneous inter-networks.

Designing a Deployable Internet: The Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol

The Internet was designed to interconnect a few hundreds networks, but now has more than a billion hosts. The scalability issues associated with this growth have driven both academia and industry to review the current architecture in the light of the Locator/Identifier Split paradigm. However, changing the routing and addressing architecture of the Internet in an incrementally deployable manner imposes several constraints. The authors use the IETFs Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) as a reference to describe different design choices necessary to achieve deployability, which is the ultimate goal of any future Internet architecture.

vSP: Building a virtual Service Provider with off-the-shelf cloud services

The ability to connect through several service providers, is becoming common in both residential and enterprise networks with a high potential to enabling rich cloud-based network services for all. However, traffic engineering in such context remains a challenge as having different service providers means as well having different, independent, provider-specific policies that seldom work together, while often being conflicting. To overcome the hassle of trying to have a coherent traffic engineering based on independent ISPs that would truly enable rich cloud-based network services, we propose to create an over-the-top virtual Service Provider - vSP. We show that based on existing cloud services and off-the-shelf technology it is possible to easily deploy its own vSP, including an easy to use management framework allowing full policies control so to have a coherent traffic engineering while fully exploiting the underlying ISPs and thus benefit from network services offloaded to the cloud.

A Virtual Service Provider for SOHO Networks

The ability of SOHO networks to connect to the Internet through several Internet service providers, gives high potential to enable rich cloud-based network services for enterprises. Nevertheless, it remains a huge challenge for SOHOs to leverage such multi-homing and cloud networking capabilities. For such a reason, we introduce the vSP concept (virtual Service Provider). The idea of vSP is to hide the technical complexity inherent to multi-homing and allow SOHOs to seamlessly use their cloud resources. The role of the vSP is to orchestrate traffic between the different Internet Services Providers (ISPs) in order to maximize the cloud service performance without requiring any intervention of the SOHO network administrator.