Biblio

IoT connects a large number of physical objects with the Internet that capture and exchange real-time information for service provisioning. Traditional network management schemes face challenges to manage vast amounts of network traffic generated by IoT services. Software-defined networking (SDN) and information-centric networking (ICN) are two complementary technologies that could be integrated to solve the challenges of different aspects of IoT service provisioning. ICN offers a clean-slate design to accommodate continuously increasing network traffic by considering content as a network primitive. It provides a novel solution for information propagation and delivery for large-scale IoT services. On the other hand, SDN allocates overall network management responsibilities to a central controller, where network elements act merely as traffic forwarding components. An SDN-enabled network supports ICN without deploying ICN-capable hardware. Therefore, the integration of SDN and ICN provides benefits for large-scale IoT services. This article provides a comprehensive survey on software-defined information-centric Internet of Things (SDIC-IoT) for IoT service provisioning. We present critical enabling technologies of SDIC-IoT, discuss its architecture, and describe its benefits for IoT service provisioning. We elaborate on key IoT service provisioning requirements and discuss how SDIC-IoT supports different aspects of IoT services. We define different taxonomies of SDIC-IoT literature based on various performance parameters. Furthermore, we extensively discuss different use cases, synergies, and advances to realize the SDIC-IoT concept. Finally, we present current challenges and future research directions of IoT service provisioning using SDIC-IoT.

Emerging safety-critical systems require high-performance data-parallel architectures and, problematically, ones that can guarantee tight and safe worst-case execution times. Given the complexity of existing architectures like GPUs, it is unlikely that sufficiently accurate models and algorithms for timing analysis will emerge in the foreseeable future. This motivates our work on Sim-D, a clean-slate approach to designing a real-time data-parallel architecture. Sim-D enforces a predictable execution model by isolating compute- and access resources in hardware. The DRAM controller uninterruptedly transfers tiles of data, requested by entire work-groups. This permits work-groups to be executed as a sequence of deterministic access- and compute phases, scheduling phases from up to two work-groups in parallel. Evaluation using a cycle-accurate timing model shows that Sim-D can achieve performance on par with an embedded-grade NVIDIA TK1 GPU under two conditions: applications refrain from using indirect DRAM transfers into large buffers, and Sim-D's scratchpads provide sufficient bandwidth. Sim-D's design facilitates derivation of safe WCET bounds that are tight within 12.7 percent on average, at an additional average performance penalty of \textbackslashsim∼9.2 percent caused by scheduling restrictions on phases.

Key challenges faced in the Internet today can be enumerated as follows: (1) complex route discovery mechanisms (2) latency and instability during link or device failure recovery (3) inadequacy in extending routing and addressing to limited domains, (4) complex interworking of multiple routing protocols at border routers. Routing table sizes increase with increasing number of networks indicating a scalability issue. One approach to address this spiraling complexity and performance challenges is to start fresh and re-think Internet routing and addressing. The Expedited Internet Bypass protocol (EIBP) is such a clean slate approach. In the interim, EIBP works in parallel with IP and has no dependency on layer 3 protocols. We demonstrated EIBP for routing and forwarding in an Autonomous system (AS) in our earlier work. In this article, we demonstrate EIBP for inter-AS routing. We compare EIBP's inter-AS operations and performance to Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) deployed in an intra-AS, inter-AS communications scenario with two AS.

Audit trails are critical components in enterprise business applications, typically used for storing, tracking, and auditing data. Entities in the audit trail applications have weak trust boundaries, which expose them to various security risks and attacks. To harden the security and develop secure by design applications, blockchain technology has been recently introduced in the audit trails. Blockchains take a consensus-driven clean slate approach to equip audit trails with secure and transparent data processing, without a trusted intermediary. On a downside, blockchains significantly increase the space-time complexity of the audit trails, leading to high storage costs and low transaction throughput. In this article, we introduce BlockTrail, a novel blockchain architecture that fragments the legacy blockchain systems into layers of codependent hierarchies, thereby reducing the space-time complexity and increasing the throughput. BlockTrail is prototyped on the “practical Byzantine fault tolerance” protocol with a custom-built blockchain. Experiments with BlockTrail show that compared to the conventional schemes, BlockTrail is secure and efficient, with low storage footprint.

Real time data analysis in the context of e.g. realtime monitoring or computational steering is an important tool in many fields of science, allowing scientists to make the best use of limited resources such as sensors and HPC platforms. These tools typically rely on large amounts of continuously collected data that needs to be processed in near-real time to avoid wasting compute, storage, and networking resources. Streaming pipelines are a natural fit for this use case but are inconvenient to use on high-performance computing (HPC) systems because of the diverging system software environment with big data, increasing both the cost and the complexity of the solution. In this paper we propose Neon, a clean-slate design of a streaming data processing framework for HPC systems that enables users to create arbitrarily large streaming pipelines. The experimental results on the Bebop supercomputer show significant performance improvements compared with Apache Storm, with up to 2x increased throughput and reduced latency.

Network slicing qualitatively transforms network infrastructures such that they have maximum flexibility in the context of ever-changing service requirements. While the agility of cloud native network functions (CNFs) demonstrates significant promise, virtualization and softwarization severely degrade the performance of such network functions. Considerable efforts were expended to improve the performance of virtualized systems, and at this stage 10 Gbps throughput is a real target even for container/VM-based applications. Nonetheless, the current performance of CNFs with state-of-the-art enhancements does not meet the performance requirements of next-generation 6G networks that aim for terabit-class throughput. The present pace of performance enhancements in hardware indicates that straightforward optimization of existing system components has limited possibility of filling the performance gap. As it would be reasonable to expect a single silver-bullet technology to dramatically enhance the ability of CNFs, an organic integration of various data-plane technologies with a comprehensive vision is a potential approach. In this paper, we show a future vision of system architecture for terabit-class CNFs based on effective harmonization of the technologies within the wide-range of network systems consisting of commodity hardware devices. We focus not only on the performance aspect of CNFs but also other pragmatic aspects such as interoperability with the current environment (not clean slate). We also highlight the remaining missing-link technologies revealed by the goal-oriented approach.

Deep reinforcement learning has recently been adopted for robot behavior learning, where robot skills are acquired and adapted from data generated by the robot while interacting with its environment through a trial-and-error process. Despite this success, most model-free deep reinforcement learning algorithms learn a task-specific policy from a clean slate and thus suffer from high sample complexity (i.e., they require a significant amount of interaction with the environment to learn reasonable policies and even more to reach convergence). They also suffer from poor initial performance due to executing a randomly initialized policy in the early stages of learning to obtain experience used to train a policy or value function. Model based deep reinforcement learning mitigates these shortcomings. However, it suffers from poor asymptotic performance in contrast to a model-free approach. In this work, we investigate knowledge transfer from a model-based teacher to a task-specific model-free learner to alleviate executing a randomly initialized policy in the early stages of learning. Our experiments show that this approach results in better asymptotic performance, enhanced initial performance, improved safety, better action effectiveness, and reduced sample complexity.

Satellite networks are booming to provide high-speed and low latency Internet access, but the transport layer becomes one of the main obstacles. Legacy end-to-end TCP is designed for terrestrial networks, not suitable for error-prone, propagation delay varying, and intermittent satellite links. It is necessary to make a clean-slate design for the satellite transport layer. This paper introduces a novel Information-centric Hop-by-Hop transport layer design, INTCP. It carries out hop-by-hop packets retransmission and hop-by-hop congestion control with the help of cache and request-response model. Hop-by-hop retransmission recovers lost packets on hop, reduces retransmission delay. INTCP controls traffic and congestion also by hop. Each hop tries its best to maximize its bandwidth utilization and improves end-to-end throughput. The capability of caching enables asynchronous multicast in transport layer. This would save precious spectrum resources in the satellite network. The performance of INTCP is evaluated with the simulated Starlink constellation. Long-distance communication with more than 1000km is carried out. The results demonstrate that, for the unicast scenario INTCP could reduce 42% one-way delay, 53% delay jitters, and improve 60% throughput compared with the legacy TCP. In multicast scenario, INTCP could achieve more than 6X throughput.

Deploying a new network architecture in the Internet requires changing some, but not necessarily all elements between communicating applications. One way to achieve gradual deployment is a proxy or gateway which "translates" between the new architecture and TCP/IP. We present such a proxy, called "Performance Enhancing Proxy for Deploying Network Architectures (PEP-DNA)", which allows TCP/IP applications to benefit from advanced features of a new network architecture without having to be redeveloped. Our proxy is a kernel-based Linux implementation which can be installed wherever a translation needs to occur between a new architecture and TCP/IP domains. We discuss the proxy operation in detail and evaluate its efficiency and performance in a local testbed, demonstrating that it achieves high throughput with low additional latency overhead. In our experiments, we use the Recursive InterNetwork Architecture (RINA) and Information-Centric Networking (ICN) as examples, but our proxy is modular and flexible, and hence enables realistic gradual deployment of any new "clean-slate" approaches.

Recently, network usage has evolved from resource sharing between hosts to content distribution and retrieval. Some emerging network architectures, like Named Data Networking (NDN), focus on the design of content-oriented network paradigm. However, these clean-slate network architectures are difficult to be deployed progressively and deal with the new communication requirements. Multi-Identifier Network (MIN) is a promising network architecture that contains push and pull communication semantics and supports the resolution, routing and extension of multiple network identifiers. MIN's original design was proposed in 2019, which has been improved over the past two years. In this paper, we present the current design and implementation of MIN. We also propose a fallback-based identifier extension scheme to improve the extensibility of the network. We demonstrate that MIN outperforms NDN in the scenario of progressive deployment via IP tunnel.

Name Data Networking (NDN) is a clean-slate network redesign that uses content names for routing and addressing. Facing the fact that TCP/IP is deeply entrenched in the current Internet architecture, NDN has made slow progress in industrial promotion. Meanwhile, new architectures represented by SDN, P4, etc., provide a flexible and programmable approach to network research. As a result, a centralized NDN routing mechanism is needed in the scenario for network integration between NDN and TCP/IP. Combining the NLSR protocol and the P4 environment, we introduce an efficient NDN routing mechanism that offers extensible NDN routing services (e.g., resources-location management and routing calculation) which can be programmed in the control plane. More precisely, the proposed mechanism allows the programmable switches to transmit NLSR packets to the control plane with the extended data plane. The NDN routing services are provided by control plane application which framework bases on resource-location mapping to achieve part of the NLSR mechanism. Experimental results show that the proposed mechanism can reduce the number of routing packets significantly, and introduce a slight overhead in the controller compared with NLSR simulation.

This paper integrates Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Information -Centric Networking (ICN) framework to enable low latency-based stateful routing and caching management by leveraging a novel forwarding and caching strategy. The framework is implemented in a clean- slate environment that does not rely on the TCP/IP principle. It utilizes Pending Interest Tables (PIT) instead of Forwarding Information Base (FIB) to perform data dissemination among peers in the proposed IC-SDN framework. As a result, all data exchanged and cached in the system are organized in chunks with the same interest resulting in reduced packet overhead costs. Additionally, we propose an efficient caching strategy that leverages in- network caching and naming of contents through an IC-SDN controller to support off- path caching. The testbed evaluation shows that the proposed IC-SDN implementation achieves an increased throughput and reduced latency compared to the traditional information-centric environment, especially in the high load scenarios.

Over the past decade, distributed CSMA, which forms the basis for WiFi, has been deployed ubiquitously to provide seamless and high-speed mobile internet access. However, distributed CSMA might not be ideal for future IoT/M2M applications, where the density of connected devices/sensors/controllers is expected to be orders of magnitude higher than that in present wireless networks. In such high-density networks, the overhead associated with completely distributed MAC protocols will become a bottleneck. Moreover, IoT communications are likely to have strict QoS requirements, for which the `best-effort' scheduling by present WiFi networks may be unsuitable. This calls for a clean-slate redesign of the wireless MAC taking into account the requirements for future IoT/M2M networks. In this paper, we propose a reservation-based (for minimal overhead) wireless MAC designed specifically with IoT/M2M applications in mind.

This paper describes a novel distributed mobility management (DMM) scheme for the "named-object" information centric network (ICN) architecture in which the routers forward data based on unique identifiers which are dynamically mapped to the current network addresses of a device. The work proposes and evaluates two specific handover schemes namely, hard handoff with rebinding and soft handoff with multihoming intended to provide seamless data transfer with improved throughput during handovers. The evaluation of the proposed handover schemes using system simulation along with proof-of-concept implementation in ORBIT testbed is described. The proposed handoff and scheduling throughput gains are 12.5% and 44% respectively over multiple interfaces when compared to traditional IP network with equal share split scheme. The handover performance with respect to RTT and throughput demonstrate the benefits of clean slate network architecture for beyond 5G networks.

With the increasing diversity of application needs (datacenters, IoT, content retrieval, industrial automation, etc.), new network architectures are continually being proposed to address specific and particular requirements. From a network management perspective, it is both important and challenging to enable evolution towards such new architectures. Given the ubiquity of the Internet, a clean-slate change of the entire infrastructure to a new architecture is impractical. It is believed that we will see new network architectures coming into existence with support for interoperability between separate architectural islands. We may have servers, and more importantly, content, residing in domains having different architectures. This paper presents COIN, a content-oriented interoperability framework for current and future Internet architectures. We seek to provide seamless connectivity and content accessibility across multiple of these network architectures, including the current Internet. COIN preserves each domain's key architectural features and mechanisms, while allowing flexibility for evolvability and extensibility. We focus on Information-Centric Networks (ICN), the prominent class of Future Internet architectures. COIN avoids expanding domain-specific protocols or namespaces. Instead, it uses an application-layer Object Resolution Service to deliver the right "foreign" names to consumers. COIN uses translation gateways that retain essential interoperability state, leverages encryption for confidentiality, and relies on domain-specific signatures to guarantee provenance and data integrity. Using NDN and MobilityFirst as important candidate solutions of ICN, and IP, we evaluate COIN. Measurements from an implementation of the gateways show that the overhead is manageable and scales well.

Recently, Future Internet research has attracted enormous attentions towards the design of clean slate Future Internet Architecture. A large number of research projects has been established by National Science Foundation's (NSF), Future Internet Architecture (FIA) program in this area. One of these projects is MobilityFirst, which recognizes the predominance of mobile networking and aims to address the challenges of this paradigm shift. Future Internet Architecture Projects, are usually deploying on large scale experimental networks for testing and evaluating the properties of new architecture and protocols. Currently only some specific experiments, like routing and name resolution scalability in MobilityFirst architecture has been performed over the ORBIT and GENI platforms. However, to move from this experimental networking to technology trials with real-world users and applications deployment of alternative testbeds are necessary. In this paper, MobilityFirst Future Internet testbed is designed and deployed on Future Networks Laboratory, University of Science and Technology of China, China. Which provides a realistic environment for MobilityFirst experiments. Next, in this paper, for MF traffic transmission between MobilityFirst networks through current networking protocols (TCP), MobilityFirst Proxies are designed and implemented. Furthermore, the results and experience obtained from experiments over proposed testbed are presented.

Superconducting technology is being seriously explored for certain applications. We propose a new clean-slate method to derive fault models from large numbers of simulation results. For this technology, our method identifies completely new fault models – overflow, pulse-escape, and pattern-sensitive – in addition to the well-known stuck-at faults.

Although OpenFlow-based SDN networks make it easier to design and test new protocols, when you think of clean slate architectures, their use is quite limited because the parameterization of its flows resides primarily in TCP/IP protocols. Besides, despite the many benefits that SDN offers, some aspects have not yet been adequately addressed, such as management plane activities, network startup, and options for connecting the data plane to the control plane. Based on these issues and limitations, this work presents a bootstrap protocol for SDN-based networks, which allows, beyond the network topology discovery, automatic configuration of an inband control plane. The protocol is designed to act only on layer two, in an autonomous, distributed and deterministic way, with low overhead and has the intent to be the basement for the implementation of other management plane related activities. A formal specification of the protocol is provided. In addition, an analytical model was created to preview the number of required messages to establish the control plane. According to this model, the proposed protocol presents less overhead than similar de-facto protocols used to topology discovery in SDN networks.

"Moving fast, and breaking things", instead of "being safe and secure", is the credo of the IT industry. However, if we look at the wide societal impact of IT security incidents in the past years, it seems like it is no longer sustainable. Just like in the case of Equifax, people simply forget updates, just like in the case of Maersk, companies do not use sufficient network segmentation. Security certification does not seem to help with this issue. After all, Equifax was IS027001 compliant.In this paper, we take a look at how we handle and (do not) learn from security incidents in IT security. We do this by comparing IT security incidents to early and later aviation safety. We find interesting parallels to early aviation safety, and outline the governance levers that could make the world of IT more secure, which were already successful in making flying the most secure way of transportation.

Software defined systems use virtualization technologies to provide an abstraction of the hardware infrastructure at different layers. Ultimately, the adoption of software defined systems in all cloud infrastructure components will lead to Software Defined Cloud Computing. Nevertheless, virtualization has already been used for years and is a key element of cloud computing. Traditionally, virtual machines are deployed in cloud infrastructure and used to execute applications on common operating systems. New lightweight virtualization technologies, such as containers and unikernels, appeared later to improve resource efficiency and facilitate the decomposition of big monolithic applications into multiple, smaller services. In this work, we present and empirically evaluate four popular unikernel technologies, Docker containers and Docker LinuxKit. We deployed containers both on bare metal and on virtual machines. To fairly evaluate their performance, we created similar applications for unikernels and containers. Additionally, we deployed full-fledged database applications ported on both virtualization technologies. Although in bibliography there are a few studies which compare unikernels and containers, in our study for the first time, we provide a comprehensive performance evaluation of clean-slate and legacy unikernels, Docker containers and Docker LinuxKit.

The explosive growth of mobile traffic in the Internet makes content delivery a challenging issue to cope with. To promote efficiency of content distribution and reduce network cost, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and content providers (CPs) are motivated to cooperatively work. As a clean-slate solution, nowadays Information-Centric Networking architectures have been proposed and widely researched, where the thought of in-network caching, especially edge caching, can be applied to mobile wireless networks to fundamentally address this problem. Considered the profit split issue between ISPs and CPs and the influence of content popularity is largely ignored, in this paper, we propose a Stackelberg-based optimal network profit split scheme for content delivery in information-centric wireless networks. Simulation results show that the performance of our proposed model is comparable to its centralized solution and obviously superior to current ISP-CP cooperative schemes without considering cache deployment in the network.

Research on Future Internet has gained traction in recent years, with a variety of clean-slate network architectures being proposed. The realization of such proposals may lead to a period of coexistence with the current Internet, creating a heterogeneous Future Internet. In such a vision, mobile nodes (MNs) can move across access networks supporting different network architectures, while being able to maintain the access to content during this movement. In order to support such scenarios, this paper proposes an inter-network architecture mobility framework that allows MNs to move across different network architectures without losing access to the contents being accessed. The usage of the proposed framework is exemplified and evaluated in a mobility scenario targeting IP and NDN network architectures in a content retrieval use case. The obtained results validate the proposed framework while highlighting the impact on the overall communication between the MN and content source.

This paper reports the definition, setup and obtained results of the Fed4FIRE + medium experiment ERASER, aimed to evaluate the actual Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees that the clean-slate Recursive InterNetwork Architecture (RINA) can deliver to heterogeneous applications at large-scale. To this goal, a 37-Node 5G metro/regional RINA network scenario, spanning from the end-user to the server where applications run in a datacenter has been configured in the Virtual Wall experimentation facility. This scenario has initially been loaded with synthetic application traffic flows, with diverse QoS requirements, thus reproducing different network load conditions. Next,their experienced QoS metrics end-to-end have been measured with two different QTA-Mux (i.e., the most accepted candidate scheduling policy for providing RINA with its QoS support) deployment scenarios. Moreover, on this RINA network scenario loaded with synthetic application traffic flows, a real HD (1080p) video streaming demonstration has also been conducted, setting up video streaming sessions to end-users at different network locations, illustrating the perceived Quality of Experience (QoE). Obtained results in ERASER disclose that, by appropriately deploying and configuring QTA-Mux, RINA can yield effective QoS support, which has provided perfect QoE in almost all locations in our demo when assigning video traffic flows the highest (i.e., Gold) QoS Cube.

With the gradual progress of cloud computing, big data, network virtualization and other network technology. The traditional network architecture can no longer support this huge business. At this time, the clean slate team defined a new network architecture, SDN (Software Defined Network). It has brought about tremendous changes in the development of today's networks. The controller sends the flow table down to the switch, and the data flow is forwarded through matching flow table items. However, the current flow table resources of the SDN switch are very limited. Therefore, this paper studies the technology of the latest SDN Flow table optimization at home and abroad, proposes an efficient optimization scheme of Flow table item on the betweenness centrality through the main road selection algorithm, and realizes related applications by setting up experimental topology. Experiments show that this scheme can greatly reduce the number of flow table items of switches, especially the more hosts there are in the topology, the more obvious the experimental effect is. And the experiment proves that the optimization success rate is over 80%.

Tactical edge networks represent a uniquely challenging environment from the communications perspective, due to their limited bandwidth and high node mobility. Several middleware communication solutions have been proposed to address those issues, adopting an evolutionary design approach that requires facing quite a few complications to provide applications with a suited network programming model while building on top of the TCP/IP stack. Information Centric Networking (ICN), instead, represents a revolutionary, clean slate approach that aims at replacing the entire TCP/IP stack with a new communication paradigm, better suited to cope with fluctuating channel conditions and network disruptions. This paper, stemmed from research conducted within NATO IST-161 RTG, investigates the effectiveness of Named Data Networking (NDN), the de facto standard implementation of ICN, in the context of tactical edge networks and its potential for adoption. We evaluated an NDN-based Blue Force Tracking (BFT) dissemination application within the Anglova scenario emulation environment, and found that NDN obtained better-than-expected results in terms of delivery ratio and latency, at the expense of a relatively high bandwidth consumption.