Jan Janak

NetServ Framework Design and Implementation 1.0

Eyeball ISPs today are under-utilizing an important asset: edge routers. We present NetServ, a programmable node architecture aimed at turning edge routers into distributed service hosting platforms. This allows ISPs to allocate router resources to content publishers and application service providers motivated to deploy content and services at the network edge. This model provides important benefits over currently available solutions like CDN. Content and services can be brought closer to end users by dynamically installing and removing custom modules as needed throughout the network. Unlike previous programmable router proposals which focused on customizing features of a router, NetServ focuses on deploying content and services. All our design decisions reflect this change in focus. We set three main design goals: a wide-area deployment, a multi-user execution environment, and a clear economic benefit. We built a prototype using Linux, NSIS signaling, and the Java OSGi framework. We also implemented four prototype applications: ActiveCDN provides publisher-specific content distribution and processing; KeepAlive Responder and Media Relay reduce the infrastructure needs of telephony providers; and Overload Control makes it possible to deploy more flexible algorithms to handle excessive traffic.

How green is IP-telephony?

With constantly increasing costs of energy, we ask ourselves what we can say about the energy efficiency of existing VoIP systems. To answer that question, we gather information about the existing client-server and peer-to-peer VoIP systems, build energy models for these systems, and evaluate their power consumption and relative energy efficiency through analysis and a series of experiments. Contrary to the recent work on energy efficiency of peer-to-peer systems, we find that even with efficient peers a peer-to-peer architecture can be less energy efficient than a client-server architecture. We also find that the presence of NATs in the network is a major obstacle in building energy efficient VoIP systems. We then provide a number of recommendations for making VoIP systems more energy efficient.

Extending the NetServ autonomic management capabilities using OpenFlow

Autonomic management capabilities of the Future Internet can be provided through a recently proposed service architecture called NetServ. It consists of the interconnection of programmable nodes which enable dynamic deployment and execution of network and application services. This paper shows how this architecture can be further improved by introducing the OpenFlow architecture and implementing the OpenFlow controller as a NetServ service, thus improving both the NetServ management performance and its flexibility. These achievements are demonstrated experimentally on the GENI environment, showing the platform self-protecting capabilities in case of a SIP DoS attack.

WiMAX in the Classroom: Designing a Cellular Networking Hands-On Lab

Wireless networking has recently gained tremendous attention in research and education. Since the concepts taught in wireless courses are difficult to acquire only through lectures, hands-on lab experience is indispensable. While Wi-Fi based networking labs have been introduced before, to the best of our knowledge, labs that use a cellular technology have not been designed yet. Therefore, we present a WiMAX hands-on lab designed for a graduate course in wireless and mobile networking. The lab is based on the mobile WiMAX hardware and software developed and deployed within the GENI WiMAX project. We provide a brief overview of the course and of the main concepts taught in the WiMAX lecture. Then, we describe in detail our WiMAX network and the structure of the lab experiment. The effectiveness in achieving the learning objectives is evaluated via the lab reports submitted by the students. Finally, we review some of the lessons we learned during design and implementation of this lab. These can provide important insights to designers of similar labs.

Flexible network address mapping for container-based clouds

Container-based clouds have recently received great attention from the industry. However, we notice that this new type of cloud inevitably requires complex network setups and configurations from both providers and customers when deployed on an existing cloud system; Providers need to install additional network elements such as proxy servers and Network Address Translation (NAT), and customers need to use subdomain names and randomly assigned port numbers to access their services. Thus, we propose a new network architecture that performs M-to-N mapping between network addresses and containers in order to simplify the network setup and configuration. To achieve our goals, we adopt a software-defined networking (SDN) approach. We discuss the benefits and use cases of our approach, and present detailed designs and implementation.

Connecting the Physical World with Arduino in SECE

The Internet of Things (IoT) enables the physical world to be connected and controlled over the Internet. This paper presents a smart gateway platform that connects everyday objects such as lights, thermometers, and TVs over the Internet. The proposed hardware architecture is implemented on an Arduino platform with a variety of offthe-shelf home automation technologies such as Zigbee and X10. Using the microcontroller-based platform, the SECE (Sense Everything, Control Everything) system allows users to create various IoT services such as monitoring sensors, controlling actuators, triggering action events, and periodic sensor reporting. We give an overview of the Arduino-based smart gateway architecture and its integration into SECE.

GRAND: Git Revisions As Named Data

GRAND is an experimental extension of Git, a distributed revision control system, which enables the synchronization of Git repositories over Content-Centric Networks (CCN). GRAND brings some of the benefits of CCN to Git, such as transparent caching, load balancing, and the ability to fetch objects by name rather than location. Our implementation is based on CCNx, a reference implementation of content router. The current prototype consists of two components: git-daemon-ccnx allows a node to publish its local Git repositories to CCNx Content Store; git-remote-ccnx implements CCNx transport on the client side. This adds CCN to the set of transport protocols supported by Git, alongside HTTP and SSH.

Columbia University WiMAX Campus Deployment and Installation

6 Base station deployment 9 12 6.1 Completed WiMAX installation and deployment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 13 6.2 WiMAX kit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 14 6.3 Conceptual diagram for deployment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 15 6.4 Topology setting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 16 6.5 PDU setting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 17 6.6 Router setting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 18

NetServ: Reviving Active Networks

In 1996, Tennenhouse and Wetherall proposed active networks, where users can inject code modules into network nodes. The proposal sparked intense debate and followon research, but ultimately failed to win over the networking community. Fifteen years later, the problems that motivated the active networks proposal persist. We call for a revival of active networks. We present NetServ, a fully integrated active network system that provides all the necessary functionality to be deployable, addressing the core problems that prevented the practical success of earlier approaches. We make the following contributions. We present a hybrid approach to active networking, which combines the best qualities from the two extreme approaches– integrated and discrete. We built a working system that strikes the right balance between security and performance by leveraging current technologies. We suggest an economic model based on NetServ between content providers and ISPs. We built four applications to illustrate the model.