Olivier Bonaventure

Interdomain traffic engineering with BGP

Traffic engineering is performed by means of a set of techniques that can be used to better control the flow of packets inside an IP network. We discuss the utilization of these techniques across interdomain boundaries in the global Internet. We first analyze the characteristics of interdomain traffic on the basis of measurements from three different Internet service providers and show that a small number of sources are responsible for a large fraction of the traffic. Across interdomain boundaries, traffic engineering relies on a careful tuning of the route advertisements sent via the border gateway protocol. We explain how this tuning can be used to control the flow of incoming and outgoing traffic, and identify its limitations.

Exploring mobile/WiFi handover with multipath TCP

Mobile Operators see an unending growth of data traffic generated by their customers on their mobile data networks. As the operators start to have a hard time carrying all this traffic over 3G or 4G networks, offloading to WiFi is being considered. Multipath TCP (MPTCP) is an evolution of TCP that allows the simultaneous use of multiple interfaces for a single connection while still presenting a standard TCP socket API to the application. The protocol specification of Multipath TCP has foreseen the different building blocks to allow transparent handover from WiFi to 3G back and forth. In this paper we experimentally prove the feasibility of using MPTCP for mobile/WiFi handover in the current Internet. Our experiments run over real WiFi/3G networks and use our Linux kernel implementation of MPTCP that we enhanced to better support handover. We analyze MPTCPs energy consumption and handover performance in various operational modes. We find that MPTCP enables smooth handovers offering reasonable performance even for very demanding applications such as VoIP. Finally, our experiments showed that lost MPTCP control signals can adversely affect handover performance; we implement and test a simple but effective solution to this issue.

MultiPath TCP: from theory to practice

The IETF is developing a new transport layer solution, MultiPath TCP (MPTCP), which allows to efficiently exploit several Internet paths between a pair of hosts, while presenting a single TCP connection to the application layer. From an implementation viewpoint, multiplexing flows at the transport layer raises several challenges. We first explain how this major TCP extension affects the Linux TCP/IP stack when considering the establishment of TCP connections and the transmission and reception of data over multiple paths. Then, based on our implementation of MultiPath TCP in the Linux kernel, we explain how such an implementation can be optimized to achieve high performance and report measurements showing the performance of receive buffer tuning and coupled congestion control.

Opportunities and research challenges of hybrid software defined networks

Software Defined Networking (SDN) promises to ease design, operation and management of communication networks. However, SDN comes with its own set of challenges, including incremental deployability, robustness, and scalability. Those challenges make a full SDN deployment difficult in the short-term and possibly inconvenient in the longer-term. In this paper, we explore hybrid SDN models that combine SDN with a more traditional networking approach based on distributed protocols. We show a number of use cases in which hybrid models can mitigate the respective limitations of traditional and SDN approaches, providing incentives to (partially) transition to SDN. Further, we expose the qualitatively diverse tradeoffs that are naturally achieved in hybrid models, making them convenient for different transition strategies and long-term network designs. For those reasons, we argue that hybrid SDN architectures deserve more attention from the scientific community.

Achieving sub-50 milliseconds recovery upon BGP peering link failures

Recent measurements show that BGP peering links can fail as frequently as intradomain links and usually for short periods of time. We propose a new fast-reroute technique where routers are prepared to react quickly to interdomain link failures. For each of its interdomain links, a router precomputes a protection tunnel, i.e., an IP tunnel to an alternate nexthop which can reach the same destinations as via the protected link.We propose a BGP-based auto-discovery technique that allows each router to learn the candidate protection tunnels for its links. Each router selects the best protection tunnels for its links and when it detects an interdomain link failure, it immediately encapsulates the packets to send them through the protection tunnel. Our solution is applicable for the links between large transit ISPs and also for the links between multi-homed stub networks and their providers. Furthermore, we show that transient forwarding loops (and thus the corresponding packet losses) can be avoided during the routing convergence that follows the deactivation of a protection tunnel in BGP/MPLS VPNs and in IP networks using encapsulation.

An efficient algorithm to enable path diversity in link state routing networks

Multipath routing allows for load balancing and fast re-routing in order to improve the reliability and the efficiency of the network. Current IP routers only support Equal Cost MultiPath (ECMP) which guarantees that the forwarding paths do not contain loops. However, ECMP provides limited path diversity. In this paper, we present an efficient algorithm that allows routers to enable more path diversity: our algorithm let all routers compute at least the two best first hop distinct paths towards each destination and achieves a good tradeoff between path diversity and overhead. In addition, we propose a multipath routing scheme whose goal is to combine fast re-routing and load balancing loop-free routes. The low overhead of our scheme (no additional signaling messages and low complexity) and the nature of its loop-free rules allow to incrementally deploy it on current IP routers. Using actual, inferred, and generated topologies, we compare our algorithm to existing solutions.

Disruption Free Topology Reconfiguration in OSPF Networks

A few modifications to software and/or hardware of routers have been proposed recently to avoid the transient micro loops that can occur during the convergence of link-state interior gateway protocols like IS-IS and OSPF. We1 propose in this paper a technique that does not require modifications to ISIS and OSPF, and that can be applied now by ISPs. Roughly, in the case of a manual modification of the state of a link, we progressively change the metric associated with this link to reach the required modification by ensuring that each step of the progression will be loop-free. The number of changes that are applied to a link to reach the targeted state by ensuring the transient consistency of the forwarding inside the network is minimized. Analysis performed on real regional and tier-1 ISP topologies show that the number of required transient changes is small. The solution can be applied in the case of link metric updates, manual set up, and shut down of links.

Open issues in interdomain routing: a survey

This article surveys several research challenges in interdomain routing. We introduce and describe these challenges in a comprehensible manner, along with a review of the most compelling contributions and ongoing research efforts addressing each of the exposed issues. During this analysis we identify the relation between these research challenges and now they influence each other. We also present our perspectives on why these issues remain largely unsolved, and point out why some of the proposals made so far have not yet been adopted. We hope this can provide some insight on future directions in this complex research area.

Experimental evaluation of multipath TCP schedulers

Today many end hosts are equipped with multiple interfaces. These interfaces can be utilized simultaneously by multipath protocols to pool resources of the links in an efficient way while also providing resilience to eventual link failures. However how to schedule the data segments over multiple links is a challenging problem, and highly influences the performance of multipath protocols. In this paper, we focus on different schedulers for Multipath TCP. We first design and implement a generic modular scheduler framework that enables testing of different schedulers for Multipath TCP. We then use this framework to do an in-depth analysis of different schedulers by running emulated and real-world experiments on a testbed. We consider bulk data transfer as well as application limited traffic and identify metrics to quantify the schedulers performance. Our results shed light on how scheduling decisions can help to improve multipath transfer.

IP micro-mobility protocols

Wireless cellular networks are quickly evolving toward broadband offering higher bandwidth. At the same time, these networks are also moving toward all-IP networks. In this article, we first describe the global mobility landscape for these future networks. This landscape is designed to be as generic as possible to allow us to compare several IP mobility management proposals with very different characteristics. We illustrate the utilization of this landscape with a short presentation of the IP-level mobility management in general packet radio service (GPRS) and Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) networks. We then point out and describe the important issues that must be addressed to manage mobile nodes. These issues include mainly handoff management, the support of passive connectivity and paging, scalability and robustness. Within this framework we examine mobile IP as a first IP mobility management protocol. We then present the well known distinction between macro-mobility and micro-mobility and the advantages of this approach. Finally, we compare seven of the recently proposed IP micro-mobility protocols: hierarchical mobile IP, proactive handoff, fast handoff, telecommunication-enhanced mobile IP architecture (TeleMIP), cellular IP, HAWAII, and Edge mobility architecture (EMA). We find that, while the micro-mobility protocols proposed thus far do address a number of interesting issues, more work remains to be done in order to arrive at a scalable, reliable solution.