Francesco Bronzino

Congestion-aware edge caching for adaptive video streaming in Information-Centric Networks

This paper proposes a network-aware resource management scheme that improves the quality of experience (QoE) for adaptive video streaming in CDNs and Information-Centric Networks (ICN) in general, and Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) in particular. By utilizing the DASH manifest, the network (by way of a logically centralized controller) computes the available link resources and schedules the chunk dissemination to edge caches ahead of the end-users requests. Our approach is optimized for multi-rate DASH videos. We implemented our resource management scheme, and demonstrated that in the scenario when network conditions evolve quickly, our approach can maintain smooth high quality playback. We show on actual video server data and in our own simulation environment that a significant reduction in peak bandwidth of 20% can be achieved using our approach.

Network service abstractions for a mobility-centric future internet architecture

The increasing composition of mobile devices and mobile applications in the Internet requires us to revisit the traditional principles of fixed, host-centric communications, when designing a next-generation architecture. To support this major shift, we define in this paper a set of basic service abstractions that should be afforded by a future Internet that is centered upon the notion of self-certifying globally unique IDs (GUID) for all network principals - hosts, content, services, etc. alike. We followup with a specific set of network service APIs that provide full access to the proposed abstractions, and implement these on Linux and Android hosts that connect to an instantiation of the future Internet architecture proposal - MobilityFirst [5]. Using performance benchmarks and the implementation of representative use cases we show that the API is flexible and can enable efficient and robust versions of present and future applications.

Achieving Scalable Push Multicast Services Using Global Name Resolution

This paper presents a novel approach to achieving scalable push multicast services using the distributed global name resolution service associated with emerging name-based network architectures. The proposed named-object multicast (NOMA) scheme employs unique names to identify multicast groups while using the global name resolution service (GNRS) to store the tree structure and maintain current mappings to mobile end-user addresses. The NOMA scheme achieves improved scalability and performance over conventional multicast protocols such as PIM-SM and MDSP by taking advantage of the GNRS to simplify tree management and limit control overhead. Performance evaluation results including comparisons with IP multicast are given using a combination of analysis and NS-3 simulation. The results show good scalability properties along with low control overhead for medium to large multicast groups. In addition, NOMA seamlessly handles mobility for end-hosts subscribed to a group, avoiding data losses upon mobility events. Results further demonstrate how separating names from addresses enables NOMA to dynamically forward traffic to mobile users. In conclusion, we describe a proof-of-concept prototype developed for further experimental validation of the proposed NOMA multicast routing scheme.

Exploiting network awareness to enhance DASH over wireless

The introduction of Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) helped reduce the consumption of resources in video delivery, but its client-based rate adaptation is unable to optimally use the available end-to-end network bandwidth. We consider the problem of optimizing the delivery of video content to mobile clients while meeting the constraints imposed by the available network resources. Observing the bandwidth available in the networks two main components, core network, transferring the video from the servers to edge nodes close to the client, and the edge network, which is in charge of transferring the content to the user via wireless links, we aim to find an optimal solution by exploiting the predictability of future user requests of sequential video segments, as well as the knowledge of available infrastructural resources at the core and edge wireless networks in a given future time window. Instead of regarding the bottleneck of the end-to-end connection as our throughput, we distribute the traffic load over time and use intermediate nodes between the server and the client for buffering video content to achieve higher throughput, and ultimately significantly improve the Quality of Experience for the end user in comparison with current solutions.

Experiences with testbed evaluation of the MobilityFirst Future Internet Architecture

This paper reports results and experiences from the validation process performed to experimentally evaluate the design of the Future Internet Architecture MobilityFirst. Next, we discuss possible evaluation strategies that take into account the desired scale and degree of realism necessary for validation. Specific examples of experimental evaluations for the MobilityFirst architecture running on the ORBIT and GENI testbed are given. These include routing and name resolution scalability experiments on ORBIT, service-level evaluations on GENI, and real world experimentation with end-users using both ORBIT and GENI capabilities. Selected results from these experiments are presented and discussed in context of MobilityFirst evaluation goals.

An adaptive hybrid CDN/P2P solution for Content Delivery Networks

Streaming services have grown rapidly in the last few years and providers of video on-demand, such as Netflix or YouTube, are increasing the number of users even more quickly. The majority of these companies implement their services using huge Content Delivery Networks that are as much powerful as expensive, e.g. Amazon and Akamai. In this paper we propose a hybrid CDN/P2P solution that aims at reducing the infrastructural costs exploiting local caching and P2P while guaranteeing an optimal quality of service. The proposed architecture uses a classic CDN complemented by a geographically distributed layer where P2P can be activated exploiting network, content awareness and locality. The performance of the proposed solution is evaluated by means of a prototype implementation that has been deployed using the PlanetLab network and the Amazon AWS cloud services. Our findings show that the proposed approach provides adaptive, flexible, scalable and content centric service to the end users while significantly reducing the infrastructural costs.

MFTP: A Clean-Slate Transport Protocol for the Information Centric Mobilityfirst Network

This paper presents the design and evaluation of clean-slate transport layer protocols for the MobilityFirst (MF) future Internet architecture based on the concept of named objects. The MF architecture is a specific realization of the emerging class of Information Centric Networks (ICN) that are designed to support new modes of communication based on names of information objects rather than their network addresses or locators. ICN architectures including MF are characterized by the following distinctive features: (a) use of names to identify sources and sinks of information; (b) storage of information at routers within the network in order to support content caching and disconnection; (c) multicasting and anycasting as integral network services; and in the MF case (d) hop-by-hop reliability protocols between routers in the network. These properties have significant implications for transport layer protocol design since the current Internet transports (TCP and UDP) were designed for the end-to-end Internet principle which uses address based routing with minimal functionality (i.e. no storage or reliability mechanisms) within the network. Several use cases including web access, large file transfer, Machine-to-machine and multicast services are considered, leading to an identification of four basic functions needed to constitute a flexible transport protocol for ICN: (i) fragmentation and end-to-end re-sequencing; (ii) lightweight end-to-end error recovery with in-network transport proxies; (iii) optional flow and congestion control mechanisms; and (iv) scalable multicast delivery mechanisms. The design of the MobilityFirst transport protocol (MFTP) framework realizing these features in a modular and flexible manner is presented and discussed. The proposed MFTP protocol is then experimentally evaluated and compared with TCP/IP for a few representative scenarios including mobile data delivery, web content retrieval and disconnected/late binding service. The results show that significant performance gains can be achieved in each case.

In-Network Compute Extensions for Rate-Adaptive Content Delivery in Mobile Networks

Traffic from mobile wireless networks has been growing at a fast pace in recent years and is expected to surpass wired traffic very soon. Service providers face significant challenges at such scales including providing seamless mobility, efficient data delivery, security, and provisioning capacity at the wireless edge. In the Mobility First project, we have been exploring clean slate enhancements to the network protocols that can inherently provide support for at-scale mobility and trustworthiness in the Internet. An extensible data plane using pluggable compute-layer services is a key component of this architecture. We believe these extensions can be used to implement in-network services to enhance mobile end-user experience by either off-loading work and/or traffic from mobile devices, or by enabling en-route service-adaptation through context-awareness (e.g., Knowing contemporary access bandwidth). In this work we present details of the architectural support for in-network services within Mobility First, and propose protocol and service-API extensions to flexibly address these pluggable services from end-points. As a demonstrative example, we implement an in network service that does rate adaptation when delivering video streams to mobile devices that experience variable connection quality. We present details of our deployment and evaluation of the non-IP protocols along with compute-layer extensions on the GENI test bed, where we used a set of programmable nodes across 7 distributed sites to configure a Mobility First network with hosts, routers, and in-network compute services.

nepi-ng: an efficient experiment control tool in R2lab

Experimentation is an essential step for realistic evaluation of wireless network protocols. The evaluation methodology entails controllable environment conditions and a rigorous and efficient experiment control and orchestration for a variety of scenarios. Existing experiment control tools such as OMF often lack in efficiency in terms of resource management and rely on abstractions that hide the details about the wireless set-up. In this paper, we propose nepi-ng, an efficient experiment control tool that leverages job oriented programming model and efficient single-thread execution of parallel programs using asyncio. nepi-ng provides an efficient and modular fine grain synchronization mechanism for networking experiments with light software dependency footprint. We present and discuss our design choices and compare to the state of the art tools, mainly OMF.

Evaluating 5G Multihoming Services in the MobilityFirst Future Internet Architecture

In the recent years it has become increasingly evident that the current end-to-end host-centric communication paradigm will not be capable of meeting the ongoing demand for massive data rates and ultra-low latency. With the advent of fifth generation of cellular architecture (5G) to support these requirements on the wireless edge of the network, the need for core network solutions to play a complementary role is conspicuous. In this paper we present and tackle some of the challenges of deploying a Future Internet Architecture (FIA), called MobilityFirst (MF), specifically for 5G use case scenarios. We report our findings of the deployment based on a setup on a small- scale testbed (ORBIT) and a nation-wide distributed testbed (GENI), and illustrate some results for the use case of device multihoming, in comparison with current TCP/IP based solution, i.e. Multipath TCP.