Jianli Pan

A survey of the research on future internet architectures

The current Internet, which was designed over 40 years ago, is facing unprecedented challenges in many aspects, especially in the commercial context. The emerging demands for security, mobility, content distribution, etc. are hard to be met by incremental changes through ad-hoc patches. New clean-slate architecture designs based on new design principles are expected to address these challenges. In this survey article, we investigate the key research topics in the area of future Internet architecture. Many ongoing research projects from United States, the European Union, Japan, China, and other places are introduced and discussed. We aim to draw an overall picture of the current research progress on the future Internet architecture.

Architectures for the future networks and the next generation Internet: A survey

Networking research funding agencies in USA, Europe, Japan, and other countries are encouraging research on revolutionary networking architectures that may or may not be bound by the restrictions of the current TCP/IP based Internet. We present a comprehensive survey of such research projects and activities. The topics covered include various testbeds for experimentations for new architectures, new security mechanisms, content delivery mechanisms, management and control frameworks, service architectures, and routing mechanisms. Delay/disruption tolerant networks which allow communications even when complete end-to-end path is not available are also discussed.

MILSA: A Mobility and Multihoming Supporting Identifier Locator Split Architecture for Naming in the Next Generation Internet

Naming and addressing are important issues for next generation Internet (NGI). In this paper, we discuss a new mobility and multihoming supporting identifier locator split architecture (MILSA). There are three main contributions of our solution. First, we separate trust relationships (realms) from connectivity (zones). A hierarchical identifier system for the realms and a Realm Zone Bridging Server (RZBS) infrastructure that performs the bridging function is introduced. Second, we separate the signaling and data plane functions to improve the performance and support mobility. Third, to provide transparency to the upper layer applications, identifier locator split happens in network layer. A Hierarchical URI-like Identifier (HUI) is used by the upper layers and is mapped to a locators set by HUI Mapping Sublayer (HMS) through interaction with RZBS infrastructure. Further scenarios description and analysis show the benefits of this scheme for routing scalability, mobility and multihoming.

MILSA: A New Evolutionary Architecture for Scalability, Mobility, and Multihoming in the Future Internet

Many challenges to the Internet including global routing scalability have drawn significant attention from both industry and academia, and have generated several new ideas for the next generation. MILSA (Mobility and Multihoming supporting Identifier Locator Split Architecture) and related enhancements are designed to address the naming, addressing, and routing scalability challenges, provide mobility and multihoming support, and easy transition from the current Internet. In this paper, we synthesize our research into a multiple-tier realm-based framework and present the fundamental principles behind the architecture. Through detailed presentation of these principles and different aspects of our architecture, the underlying design rationale is justified. We also discuss how our proposal can meet the IRTF RRG design goals. As an evolutionary architecture, MILSA balances the high-level long-run architecture design with ease of transition considerations. Additionally, detailed evaluation of the current inter-domain routing system and the achievable improvements deploying our architecture is presented that reveals the roots of the current difficulties and helps to shape our deployment strategy.

A Survey of Energy Efficiency in Buildings and Microgrids using Networking Technologies

Intelligent buildings and microgrids are important parts of the future smart grid. The adoption and development process of the intelligent buildings has been slow. There are multiple technical and non-technical reasons. However, two recent trends have accelerated the research and application of the technologies related to this area. First, skyrocketing energy price and the global need for reducing fossil oil consumption for environmental sustainability combined with the fact that buildings are a significant source of energy consumption, making buildings intelligent and energy efficient will have huge impacts on the total CO2 emission and hence global sustainability. Second, rapid popularity and maturation of mobile smart phone technology and Internet technologies like cloud computing enable smart phone holders to be aware of their energy consumption and participate in controlling and running their buildings with seamless Internet connections. Cloud computing enables active interactions between the consumer-side (buildings) and the provider-side (smart grids). Hence, combining energy efficiency and networking perspectives, in this paper, we investigate the key research topics through a broad survey on the latest developments in intelligent buildings and our vision of microgrids formed by such buildings. Our aim is to draw an overall picture of the current research and potential future applications. Moreover, we further summarize and discuss in detail a series of key issues and trends that can potentially motivate and impact the adoption and development of the intelligent building and microgrid technologies in the near future.

Application delivery in multi-cloud environments using software defined networking

Today, most large Application Service Providers (ASPs) such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon and Facebook operate multiple geographically distributed datacenters, serving a global user population that are often mobile. However, the service-centric deployment and delivery semantics of these modern Internet-scale applications do not fit naturally into the Internet’s host-centric design. In this service-centric model, users connect to a service, and not a particular host. A service virtualizes the application endpoint, and could be replicated, partitioned, distributed and composed over many different hosts in many different locations. To address this gap between design and use, ASPs deploy a service-centric network infrastructure within their enterprise datacenter environments while maintaining a (virtual) host-centric service access interface with the rest-of-the-Internet. This is done using data-plane mechanisms including data-plane proxying (virtualizing the service endpoint) and Layer 7 (L7) traffic steering (dynamically mapping service requests to different application servers and orchestrating service composition and chaining). However, deploying and managing a wide-area distributed infrastructure providing these service-centric mechanisms to support multi-data center environments is prohibitively expensive and difficult even for the largest of ASPs. Therefore, although recent advances in cloud computing make distributed computing resources easily available to smaller ASPs on a very flexible and dynamic pay-as-you-go resource-leasing model, it is difficult for these ASPs to leverage the opportunities provided by such multi-cloud environments without general architectural support for a service-centric Internet. In this paper, we present a new service-centric networking architecture for the current Internet called OpenADN. OpenADN will allow ASPs to be able to fully leverage multi-cloud environments for deploying and delivering their applications over a shared, service-centric, wide-area network infrastructure provided by third-party providers including Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). The OpenADN design leverages the recently proposed framework of Software Defined Networking (SDN) to implement and manage the deployment of OpenADN-aware devices. This paper focuses mostly on the data-plane design of OpenADN.

Future wireless networks: key issues and a survey (ID/locator split perspective)

Future wireless networks (FWNs) are expected to be a convergence of different kinds of wireless technologies, such as cellular technologies, wireless local area networks (WLANs), wireless metropolitan area networks, wireless sensor networks, and traditional wired networks. The internet protocol (IP) will be potentially adopted as the common networking protocol for diverse networking technologies including the next generation of cellular networks using system architecture evolution (SAE). However, the IP architecture has several known challenges, such as mobility, multihoming, routing scalability, location privacy, path preference selection, etc. One of the greatest problems preventing the networks from overcoming these challenges is that the IP address is contextually overloaded, both as locators and identifiers. As a result, in this paper, we describe the issues of all-IP wireless networks, and survey recent proposals focusing on IP address overloading that can be applied to FWNs.

Virtual ID: A Technique for Mobility, Multi-Homing, and Location Privacy in Next Generation Wireless Networks

Cellular networking standards organizations such as the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) are currently developing System Architecture Evolution (SAE) as their core network architecture. SAE is all-IP based. However, IP-based networks face several known issues, such as mobility, multihoming, location privacy, path preference, etc. Mobile IP (MIP) and its variants, such as Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6), Hierarchical MIP, and Proxy MIP, have been developed primarily to alleviate the mobility problem. These variation and extensions, however, still do not provide many of the features required in Next Generation Wireless Networks (NGWN). The limitations are especially due to the overloading of IP addresses as both node identity and locator. In this paper, we propose an extension to MIPv6 called Virtual ID. This concept applies the ID/Locator split idea into a Mobile IPv6 environment. Virtual ID and its extensiom provide many features that would be desired in the NGWN. Since our proposed scheme is based on the standard MIPv6 and Proxy MIPv6, the scheme is fully compatible with the legacy MIPv6.

A policy oriented multi-interface selection framework for mobile IPv6 using the ID/Locator Split concepts in the Next Generation Wireless Networks

Next Generation Wireless Networks (NGWNs) will be the convergence of fixed and mobile networking technologies, e.g., Ethernet, Wireless LAN, 2G/3G/4G, etc. This united ubiquitous network will consist of billions of mobile devices, each with multiple networking interfaces. These interfaces may belong to a set of diverse link layer technologies. Internet Protocol (IP) shall potentially be used as the inter-networking protocol to bridge this diversity in the underlying wireless link-layer similar to the present wired Internet architecture. However, the traditional IP was not designed for wireless environments and, hence, faces several issues in mobility, multihoming, user path selection, etc. The basis of most of these issues lies in the problem of contextual overloading of IP addresses to serve as both locators and identifiers. The ID/Locator Split concept is a well-known approach to overcome this problem. Mobile IPv6 can be considered as an example of an ID/Locator Split mechanism in which the home address is used as the identity of the mobile node and its care-of-addresses (CoAs) are used as locators. Cellular networking standards organizations, e.g., the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), have adopted the Mobile IP concept for next generation cellular networks to maintain the mobility in an all-IP network framework. Mobile IPv6 and its optimizations can achieve full mobility and deployability. Currently, Mobile IPv6 allows features such as multiple CoA registrations and flow binding options. Apart from mobility, these extensions provide a solution for user-multihoming. However, there is no standard mechanism to select the proper interfaces or to map CoAs underneath. In this paper, we propose a policy-based QoS framework for users to choose the best N interfaces that suit the requirements of their specific applications.

Virtual ID: ID/locator split in a mobile IP environment for mobility, multihoming and location privacy for the next generation wireless networks

Current networking protocols designed around single interface stationary end-systems clearly fail to represent the present communication context of mobile, multi-interface end-systems. Also, the convergence of wired and wireless technologies into an all-IP (AIP) next generation network will make available multiple diversified contexts that can be leveraged for better fault tolerance, higher availability and improved performance of end-to-end communications. A major reason for the weakness of current protocols may be attributed to the contextual overloading of IP addresses to serve as identifiers as well as locators. Mobile IP (MIP) and its extensions are well-known proposals developed primarily to alleviate the mobility and deployability problems. In this paper, we develop the concept of a virtual identity (ID), as an explicit ID/locator extension of mobile IPv6 and explore its applicability to address the issues of mobility, multihoming, and location privacy in the context of next generation wireless networks.