Subharthi Paul

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.

Network virtualization and software defined networking for cloud computing: a survey

Network virtualization is the key to the current and future success of cloud computing. In this article, we explain key reasons for virtualization and briefly explain several of the networking technologies that have been developed recently or are being developed in various standards bodies. In particular, we explain software defined networking, which is the key to network programmability. We also illustrate SDN¿s applicability with our own research on OpenADN - application delivery in a multi-cloud environment.

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.

An Internet of Things Framework for Smart Energy in Buildings: Designs, Prototype, and Experiments

Smart energy in buildings is an important research area of Internet of Things (IoT). As important parts of the smart grids, the energy efficiency of buildings is vital for the environment and global sustainability. Using a LEED-gold-certificated green office building, we built a unique IoT experimental testbed for our energy efficiency and building intelligence research. We first monitor and collect 1-year-long building energy usage data and then systematically evaluate and analyze them. The results show that due to the centralized and static building controls, the actual running of green buildings may not be energy efficient even though they may be “green” by design. Inspired by “energy proportional computing” in modern computers, we propose an IoT framework with smart location-based automated and networked energy control, which uses smartphone platform and cloud-computing technologies to enable multiscale energy proportionality including building-, user-, and organizational-level energy proportionality. We further build a proof-of-concept IoT network and control system prototype and carried out real-world experiments, which demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution. We envision that the broad application of the proposed solution has not only led to significant economic benefits in term of energy saving, improving home/office network intelligence, but also bought in a huge social implication in terms of global sustainability.

OpenADN: Mobile apps on global clouds using OpenFlow and Software Defined Networking

In recent years, there has been an explosive growth in mobile applications (apps), most of which need to serve global audiences. This increasing trend of service access from mobile computing devices necessitates more dynamic application deployment strategies based on the user context (user device type, mobility, link conditions, location, energy constraints, etc.) and the variations in the user access demographics. Cloud computing provides unique new opportunities for application service providers (ASPs) to implement such deployment strategies by making it possible to dynamically allocate geographically distributed computing resources to the application. However, managing such a dynamic and distributed Internet-scale application deployment environment is hard; requiring ASPs to be able to intelligently route application traffic based on high-level application deployment policies over a dynamically changing deployment environment. To this end, we propose the design of an open and standard data plane abstraction called Open Application Delivery Networking (OpenADN) that will allow ASPs to express and enforce application traffic management policies and application delivery constraints at the required level of granularity. The key motivation to designing the OpenADN abstraction is to be able to extract and standardize a set of common application delivery requirements across a wide class of applications deployed over the Internet. OpenADN is designed within the Software Defined Networking (SDN) framework allowing each ASP to implement a separate control plane application to manage the data plane entities over OpenADN to suit the specific requirements of the application. The data plane entities may belong to the ASP itself or may be delegated to third party providers such as Internet Service Providers (ISPs) or Cloud Service Providers (CSPs). We also make a case for augmenting the flow abstraction layer of SDN (OpenFlow) to add adequate support for OpenADN. OpenADN uses IP for forwarding packets to endpoint locators, making it easy to deploy over the current Internet with only a few OpenADN aware entities.

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.