Miguel Ponce de Leon

Architectural principles and elements of in-network management

Recent endeavors in addressing the challenges of the current and future Internet pursue a clean slate design methodology. Simultaneously, it is argued that the Internet is unlikely to be changed in one fell swoop and that its next generation requires an evolutionary design approach. Recognizing both positions, we claim that cleanness and evolution are not mutually exclusive, but rather complementary and indispensable properties for sustainable management in the future Internet. In this paper we propose the in-network management (INM) paradigm, which adopts a clean slate design approach to the management of future communication networks that is brought about by evolutionary design principles. The proposed paradigm builds on embedded management capabilities to address the intrinsic nature, and hence, close relationship between the network and its management. At the same time, INM assists in the gradual adoption of embedded self-managing processes to progressively achieve adequate and practical degrees of INM. We demonstrate how INM can be exploited in current and future network management by its application to P2P networks.

A Framework for In-Network Management in Heterogeneous Future Communication Networks

Future communication networks will be composed of a diversity of highly heterogeneous network variants, ranging from energy constrained wireless sensor networks to large-scale wide area networks. The fact that the size and complexity of such networks will experience tremendous growth will eventually render existing traditional network management paradigms unfeasible. We propose the radically new paradigm of in-network management,which targets the embedding of self-management capabilities deep inside the network nodes. In this paper, we focus on our framework for in-network management,which allows management logic to be embedded and executed within network nodes. Based on a specific use-case of bio-inspired network management, we demonstrate how our framework can be exploited in a network failure scenario using quorum sensing and chemotaxis.

Enabling future internet research: the FEDERICA case

The Internet, undoubtedly, is the most influential technical invention of the 20th century that affects and constantly changes all aspects of our day-to-day lives nowadays. Although it is hard to predict its long-term consequences, the potential future of the Internet definitely relies on future Internet research. Prior to every development and deployment project, an extensive and comprehensive research study must be performed in order to design, model, analyze, and evaluate all impacts of the new initiative on the existing environment. Taking the ever-growing size of the Internet and the increasing complexity of novel Internet-based applications and services into account, the evaluation and validation of new ideas cannot be effectively carried out over local test beds and small experimental networks. The gap which exists between the small-scale pilots in academic and research test beds and the realsize validations and actual deployments in production networks can be bridged by using virtual infrastructures. FEDERICA is one of the facilities, based on virtualization capabilities in both network and computing resources, which creates custom-made virtual environments and makes them available for Future Internet Researchers. This article provides a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art research projects that have been using the virtual infrastructure slices of FEDERICA in order to validate their research concepts, even when they are disruptive to the test beds infrastructure, to obtain results in realistic network environments.

Transport over heterogeneous networks using the RINA architecture

The evolution of various wireless technologies has greatly increased the interest in heterogeneous networks, in which the mobile users can enjoy services while roaming between different networks. The current Internet architecture does not seem to cope with the modern networking trends and the growing application demands for performance, stability and efficiency, as the integration of different technologies faces many problems. In this paper, we focus on the issues raised when attempting to provide seamless mobility over a hybrid environment. We highlight the shortcomings of the current architecture, discuss some of the proposed solutions and try to identify the key choices that lead to failure. Finally, we introduce RINA (Recursive Inter-Network Architecture), a newly-proposed network architecture that achieves to integrate networks of different characteristics inherently and show a simple example that demonstrates this feature.

An autonomic architecture to manage Ubiquitous Computing networks and applications

The current Internet, while successful in many aspects, has a set of associated architectural and business problems that threaten its stability and inhibit new advances, such as seamlessly supporting Ubiquitous Computing applications. This paper proposes a set of autonomic mechanisms that can manage the Future Internet. The context-aware governance features of this approach are particularly suitable for also enabling Ubiquitous Computing applications.

Bounding the router table size in an ISP network using RINA

One of the biggest problems of todays Internet is the explosion of the size of the routing tables of Internet core routers, especially due to the growth of multi-homed hosts and networks. This paper explains the benefits that the Recursive InterNetwork Architecture (RINA) brings to network service providers in terms of routing scalability: with an appropriate design the size of the router tables can be bounded. The recursive layer approach, the independence of the address space at each layer in conjunction with the use of hierarchical addressing prove to be effective tools that greatly reduce the storage requirements of routers as well as speed up the calculation of routes, resulting in more efficient and scalable routing.

Autonomic Orchestration of Future Networks to Realize Prosumer Services

The current Internet, though successful, suffers from a set of underlying architectural and business problems that threaten its ability to meet the needs of the future. This article discusses those problems, and then presents a novel approach designed to meet business needs while advocating the concept of the prosumer. This approach provides a mapping between business needs and network services, and enables changing context to determine which network services and resources are provided at any given moment.

Towards self-adaptive network management for a recursive network architecture

Traditionally, network management tasks manually performed by system administrators include monitoring alarms based on collected statistics across many heterogeneous systems, correlating these alarms to identify potential problems or changes to management policies and responding by performing system re-configurations to ensure optimal performance of network services. System administrators have a narrow focus of factors impacting network service provisioning and performance due to the heterogeneity and scale of generated underlying network events. However, self-adaption principles are conceptual approaches for autonomously managing such complex distributed systems. Network management systems that harness such principles can dynamically and autonomously optimise the operation of network services, responding quickly to changes in user requirements and underlying network conditions. In this paper, we present a novel self-adaptive network management framework that takes advantage of a recursive network architecture for a simpler and more comprehensive application of ontologies, semantic web rules and machine learning to automatically adjust network configuration parameters to provide more optimal QoS management of network services. We demonstrate the applicability of the approach using a content distribution network (CDN) operating over such a recursive network architecture.

A Case Study for Defining Interoperable Network Components Using MDD

The current Internet is built on a set of protocols, but exhibits problems in supporting applications. The network is optimised for best-effort traffic, but other functional aspects are widely neglected. Applying concepts well-known in software engineering (abstraction, composition, separation of concerns) to design the future Internet architecture is seen as a promising way forward. This paper presents a case study using Model Driven Development addressing interoperability requirements in next generation networks. Our approach focuses on the specification of a high level Contract Domain Specific Language we combine Component-based Software Engineering for the design with our long-term experience of network resource management and performance optimisation. Part of our case study is a tool chain that supports the network engineers who deploy next generation networks.

Advances in wireless test beds and research infrastructures

Communication infrastructures play a vital role in modern society. Advances in the range of service offerings, performance, quality of service, security, and ubiquity continue to flourish, despite global economic fluctuations. Clearly the world has gone wireless with a massive set of new smart phones, service platforms, middleware, and application stores. With this growth, fresh research challenges in the wireless environment have arisen, from the need for efficient energy conservation, to the integration of wireless systems into heterogeneous large scale networks, to the fast reauthentication of clients as they move between communication systems. Wireless test beds and experimental research infrastructures are playing a vital role in validating new innovations in this environment. Access to experimental wireless infrastructure for verifying real-life applications by specific user communities benefits all the stakeholders involved: the end users, because of the firsthand evaluation of the provided services, the researchers and infrastructure experimenters, because of the knowledge gained from hands-on study and analysis, and the service providers, because of the highlighted potential business exploitation of the network. The purpose of this special issue is to present the landscape of recent progress in mobile and wireless test beds. In a collection of twelve articles, this issue shows advances from the computing, networking and services perspective, providing insight into the importance and challenges of mobile networking in future communication environments. We start the issue with a review of the evolution of experimentation facilities related to the improvements in wireless mesh networking. It is clear that no single wireless network will exist on its own, but will be deployed in combination with others. In the first article by Blywis et al., it is shown how wireless mesh networking can act as an