Heikki Mahkonen

Handover performance with HIP and MIPv6

Mobility management in the current Internet is designed to work with mobile IPv4 and, when IPv6 is available, with mobile IPv6. These solutions are based on the current architecture in the Internet, where the IP address represents both the locator and the identifier of the node. In the IETF, identity and location information separation has raised a lot of discussion and new ideas have emerged to separate these. Host identity protocol is one candidate that can be used for this separation. It introduces also a new way of handling mobility management taking advantage on the mentioned identity and location separation.

Elastic network monitoring with virtual probes

The next generation monitoring solutions should evolve as fast as the applications they will support both in terms of functionality (e.g. new protocols, monitoring function, etc.) as well as in terms of scale and performance. We believe the field of network monitoring is yet to experience the same revolutionary transformation as software-defined networking (SDN) and network function visualization (NFV) brought to the telecom world. To this end we present a flexible network monitoring application we use to demonstrate the potential of next generation network monitoring with advanced probe functionality and virtualization. Our demonstration shows a new OVS-based (Open vSwitch) vProbe capable of adding and processing monitoring metadata in IETFs recently proposed network service header (NSH) for service chaining [1], [2]. The monitoring metadata in this work is used for troubleshooting performance issues (i.e. excessive latency) along service function paths (SFPs). Benefits of our approach are the flexibility it offers to create new monitoring solutions as well as the virtualization of monitoring resources in order to benefit from the same economies of scale and elasticity features of NFV. This demonstration is built as part of our proposed monitoring framework presented in [3] which consists of a monitoring platform which, on the northbound, offers a full control as well as a more limiting intent based interface. It can spin new vProbes when and where needed. The data plane used in this demonstration consists of OpenFlow switches (OVS) extended with the NSH header [4]. This work can be described as a troubleshooting use case customized for service chaining. We demonstrate a video traffic performance degradation scenario and pin down where the issue is for a given flow on a service chain.

A monitoring framework at layer4–7 granularity using network service headers

Traffic measurement and network monitoring needs have always daunted operators and recent trends of virtualization and programmable networks put a higher stress on this topic. The reality is that todays monitoring toolsets are viable for legacy network operations and traffic. With recent industry trends such as network function virtualization (NFV), software-defined networking (SDN) and everything as a service (XaaS), will follow higher network dynamicity and traffic change patterns. Network monitoring and measurement schemes need to evolve to accommodate these upcoming trends. The research community has been very active in past years in proposing new or improved mechanisms for various monitoring tasks. In this work however we leverage another recent development in the industry for network function chaining and propose to use the newly defined tunneling headers by IETFs service function chaining (SFC) working group to achieve specific and novel monitoring tasks not possible with existing methods. This papers contributions are two folds: first it proposes a framework and an architecture able to perform unified monitoring across network, cloud, physical and virtual boundaries. Second, based on layer4-7 information it proposes novel monitoring mechanisms applicable to NFV traffic. The latter distinguishes itself with respect to existing proposals by its flexibility and potential for widespread deployment as it piggybacks on IETFs SFC standardization work. This papers contributions are the system architecture, the monitoring metadata encodings with their respective use cases, as well performance results for monitoring overhead measured on a testbed implementation of this proposal.