Fernando Cuervo

A testbed and research network for next generation services over next generation networks

The complexity of todays data communication networks necessitates complete, realistic and sophisticated testing grounds for verifying and validating their functionality. Network testing grounds are restricted to laboratories and environments isolated from real life scenarios. Testing in production and commercial networks is typically forbidden since they present a high degree of risk factors for service availability. Additionally, the majority of todays communication network testbeds lack the scale and flexibility needed to properly represent a true networking environment. Before deploying live networks there is a need to have a network testing environment scalable and flexible enough where issues such as: network design, vendor interoperability, endurance, multiprotocol layer interconnectivity, a vendors specific implementations of standards and network design viability have been verified to meet the requirements. In this paper a design and implementation of a next generation network is described, where both testing and production traffic coexist. NCIT*net 2 is an optical transmission network supporting end-to-end services over technologies such as Ethernet, SONET, MPLS and DWDM. The paper also discusses key technology aspects related to the functionality of equipment and network from a service point of view. These include the physical layer and network operation, as well as architecture and control. The testbed network is used for the deployment of networking services over the above technologies in order to verify service implementation, provisioning and assurance of quality of service requirements. This network also allows testing and evaluating systems, subsystems and components from different vendors in various interconnections. The paper goes further to describe, as an example, the tests designed and implemented for the analysis of MPLS based services over next generation networks.

Service naming in large-scale and multi-domain networks

The increasing availability of high-performance network resources creates a rich breeding ground for widely-distributed applications that span multiple network domains or administrative domains. Such applications provide services that can be accessed by remote users. Discovery and management of these systems require the ability to name the provided services. In light of these requirements, we distill a set of criteria for comparison of naming schemes: readability, extensibility, namespace size, naming authority, name resolution architecture, name persistence, and standardization. Based on these criteria, we summarize and compare a representative set of existing naming and name resolution approaches. We analyze the approaches based on our criteria, and select a number of candidate technologies for the design of a naming and name resolution mechanism suitable to a multi-domain, Internet-scale environment.

Mobile video delivery using network aware transcoding in an LTE network

Delivering video over mobile wireless networks presents several unique challenges. Limited bandwidth and packet delay variation can cause artifacts, “picture freezes,” or blockages that make a video experience on a mobile client unacceptable. In this paper we address techniques to use feedback from the wireless network (congestion, channel conditions, content, user profiles) to adjust both the video stream and the delivery mechanism to dramatically increase the level of service and experience. We apply multiple control loops to realize these gains.