Stefano Secci

A service plane over the PCE architecture for automatic multidomain connection-oriented services

In this article we concentrate on the automated provisioning of inter-AS services based on GMPLS-TE technology. We consider a provider alliance where TE connections are established between the members of the alliance. We propose an efficient and economically feasible architecture for the automatic provisioning of inter-AS GMPLS-TE, based on the introduction of a multidomain service plane coupled with the PCE-based architecture.

Achieving Sub-Second Downtimes in Large-Scale Virtual Machine Migrations with LISP

Nowadays, the rapid growth of Cloud computing services is stressing the network communication infrastructure in terms of resiliency and programmability. This evolution reveals missing blocks of the current Internet Protocol architecture, in particular in terms of virtual machine mobility management for addressing and locator-identifier mapping. In this paper, we propose some changes to the Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) to cope with this gap. We define novel control-plane functions and evaluate them exhaustively in the worldwide public LISP testbed, involving five LISP sites distant from a few hundred kilometers to many thousands kilometers. Our results show that we can guarantee service downtime upon live virtual machine migration lower than a second across American, Asian and European LISP sites, and down to 300 ms within Europe, outperforming standard LISP and legacy triangular routing approaches in terms of service downtime, as a function of datacenter-datacenter and client-datacenter distances.

Network design requirements for disaster resilience in IaaS clouds

Many corporations rely on disaster recovery schemes to keep their computing and network services running after unexpected situations, such as natural disasters and attacks. As corporations migrate their infrastructure to the cloud using the infrastructure as a service model, cloud providers need to offer disaster-resilient services. This article provides guidelines to design a data center network infrastructure to support a disaster-resilient infrastructure as a service cloud. These guidelines describe design requirements, such as the time to recover from disasters, and allow the identification of important domains that deserve further research efforts, such as the choice of data center site locations and disaster-resilient virtual machine placement.

Peering equilibrium multipath routing: a game theory framework for internet peering settlements

It is generally admitted that interdomain peering links represent nowadays the main bottleneck of the Internet, particularly because of lack of coordination between providers, which use independent and “selfish” routing policies. We are interested in identifying possible “light” coordination strategies that would allow carriers to better control their peering links while preserving their independence and respective interests. We propose a robust multipath routing coordination framework for peering carriers, which relies on the multiple-exit discriminator (MED) attribute of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) as signaling medium. Our scheme relies on a game theory modeling, with a non-cooperative potential game considering both routing and congestions costs. Peering equilibrium multipath (PEMP) coordination policies can be implemented by selecting Pareto-superior Nash equilibria at each carrier. We compare different PEMP policies to BGP Multipath schemes by emulating a realistic peering scenario. Our results show that the routing cost can be decreased by roughly 10% with PEMP. We also show that the stability of routes can be significantly improved and that congestion can be practically avoided on the peering links. Finally, we discuss practical implementation aspects and extend the model to multiple players highlighting the possible incentives for the resulting extended peering framework.

Multipath Transmission for the Internet: A Survey

Smart devices equipped with multiple network interfaces are becoming commonplace. Nevertheless, even though multiple interfaces can be used to connect to the Internet, their capabilities have not been fully utilized yet because the default TCP/IP stack supports only a single interface for communication. This situation is now changing due to the emergence of multipath protocols on different network stack layers. For example, many IP level approaches have been proposed utilizing tunneling mechanisms for hiding multipath transmission from the transport protocols. Several working groups under IEEE and IETF are actively standardizing multipath transmission on the link layer and transport layer. Application level approaches enable multipath transmission capability by establishing multiple transport connections and distributing data over them. Given all these efforts, it is beneficial and timely to summarize the state-of-the-art, compare their pros and cons, and discuss about the future directions. To that end, we present a survey on multipath transmission and make several major contributions: 1) we present a complete taxonomy pertaining to multipath transmission, including link, network, transport, application, and cross layers; 2) we survey the state-of-the-art for each layer, investigate the problems that each layer aims to address, and make comprehensive assessment of the solutions; and 3) based on the comparison, we identify open issues and pinpoint future directions for multipath transmission research.

Cross-layer cooperation to boost multipath TCP performance in cloud networks

Cloud networking imposes new requirements in terms of connection resiliency and throughput among virtual machines, hypervisors and users. A promising direction is to exploit multipath communications, yet existing protocols have a so limited scope that performance improvements are often unreachable. Generally, multipathing adds signaling overhead and in certain conditions may in fact decrease throughput due to packet arrival disorder. At the transport layer, the most promising protocol is Multipath TCP (MPTCP), a backward compatible TCP extension allowing to balance the load on several TCP subflows, ideally following different physical paths, to maximize connection throughput. Current implementations create a full mesh between hosts IPs, which can be suboptimal. For situation when at least one end-point network is multihomed, we propose to enhance its subflow creation mechanism so that MPTCP creates an adequate number of subflows considering the underlying path diversity offered by an IP-in-IP mapping protocol, the Location/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP). We defined and implemented a cross-layer cooperation module between MPTCP and LISP, leading to an improved version of MPTCP we name Augmented MPTCP (A-MPTCP). We evaluated A-MPTCP for a realistic Cloud access use-case scenario involving one multi-homed data-center. Results from a large-scale test bed show us that A-MPTCP can halve the transfer times with the simple addition of one additional LIS-Penabled MPTCP subflow, hence showing promising performance for Cloud communications between multi-homed users and multihomed data-centers.

Resilient Traffic Engineering in a Transit-Edge Separated Internet Routing

The significant growth in the global Internet traffic and routing table size requires solutions to address Internet scalability and resiliency. A number of proposals have considered moving away from the flat legacy Internet routing to a two-level hierarchical routing, separating edge networks from transit carrier networks. In this paper, we study the extended inter-domain traffic engineering capabilities arising in a transit-edge separated Internet routing, focusing on those multi-homed edge networks (e.g., small ISPs, content providers, large corporations) that aim at increasing their Internet resiliency experience. We model using game theory the interaction between distant independent edge networks exchanging large traffic volumes, with the goal of seeking efficient edge-to-edge load-balancing routing solutions. The proposed traffic engineering framework relies on a non-cooperative potential game, built upon path prepending- and path diversity- dependent costs, that indicates efficient equilibrium solution for the edge-to-edge load-balancing coordination problem. Simulations on real instances show that, in comparison with the alternative multipath BGP and normal LISP, we can achieve significantly higher resiliency and stability. In particular, our simulation for an illustrating case shows four-times more stable multipath routing solutions with a five-times larger path diversity.

Design Optimization of the Petaweb Architecture

This paper explores the design modeling issues of the Petaweb, an optical network architecture that provides fully meshed connectivity between electronic edge nodes. The Petaweb is simple to manage, simplifies key networking functions such as routing and addressing and can offer a total capacity of several Petabits per second. From the topology standpoint, it is an unusual structure as the backbone nodes are totally disconnected whereas the edge nodes are all attainable in one-hop. The network design problem leads to a very hard combinatorial problem. We propose a model and a heuristic approach that is based on repeated matchings. Computational results concerning the modeling issues will be presented and thoroughly discussed.

The OpenLISP control plane architecture

Among many options tackling the scalability issues of the current Internet routing architecture, the Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) appears as a viable solution. LISP improves a networks scalability, flexibility, and traffic engineering, enabling mobility with limited overhead. As for any new technology, implementation and deployment are essential to gather and master the real benefits that it provides. In this article, we present the first complete open source implementation of the LISP control plane. Our implementation is deployed in the worldwide LISP Beta Network and the French LISP-Lab testbed, and includes the key standardized control plane features. Our control plane software is the companion of the existing OpenLISP dataplane implementation, allowing the deployment of a fully functional open source LISP network compatible with any implementation respecting the standards.

Content consumption cartography of the paris urban region using cellular probe data

A present issue in the evolution of mobile cellular networks is determining whether, how and where to deploy adaptive content and cloud distribution solutions at base station and back-hauling network level. In order to answer these questions, in this paper we document the content consumption in Orange cellular network for Paris metropolitan area. From spatial and application-level extensive analysis of real data, we numerically and statistically quantify the geographical distribution of content consumption with per-service classifications. We provide experimental statistical distributions usable for further research in the area.