Biblio

MPLS has been in the forefront of high-speed Wide Area Networks (WANs), for almost two decades [1], [12]. The performance advantages in implementing Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) are mainly its superior speed based on fast label switching and its capability to perform Fast Reroute rapidly when failure(s) occur - in theory under 50 ms [16], [17], which makes MPLS also interesting for real-time applications. We investigate the aforementioned advantages of MPLS by creating two real testbeds using actual routers that commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use, one with a ring and one with a partial mesh architecture. In those two testbeds we compare the performance of MPLS channels versus normal routing, both using the Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) routing protocol. The speed of the Fast Reroute mechanism for MPLS when failures are occurring is investigated. Firstly, baseline experiments are performed consisting of MPLS versus normal routing. Results are evaluated and compared using both single and dual failure scenarios within the two architectures. Our results confirm recovery times within 50 ms.

In the security platform of Internet of Things (IoT), a licensed Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technology, named Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is playing a vital role in transferring the information between objects. This technology is preferable for applications having a low data rate. As the number of subscribers increases, attack possibilities raise simultaneously. So securing the transmission between the objects becomes a big task. Bandwidth spoofing is one of the most sensitive attack that can be performed on the communication channel that lies between the access point and user equipment. This research proposal objective is to secure the system from the attack based on Unmanned Aerial vehicles (UAVs) enabled Small Cell Access (SCA) device which acts as an intruder between the user and valid SCA and investigating the scenario when any intruder device comes within the communication range of the NB-IoT enabled device. Here, this article also proposed a mathematical solution for the proposed scenario.

The standard routing technique that was developed for satisfying low power IoT application needs is RPL which is a protocol in compliance with 6LoWPAN specification. RPL was created for addressing the issues and challenges of constrained and lossy network routing. However, RPL does not accomplish efficiency with respect to power and reliability altogether which are definitely needed in IoT applications. RPL runs on routing metrics and objective function which determines the optimal path in routing. This paper focuses on contributing a comprehensive survey on the improved objective functions proposed by several researchers for RPL. In addition, the paper concentrates on highlighting the strengths and shortcomings of the different approaches in designing the objective function. The approaches built on Fuzzy logic are found to be more efficient and the relevant works related to these are compared. Furthermore, we present the insights drawn from the survey and summarize the challenges which can be effectively utilized for future works.

Development of an intrusion detection system, which tries to detect signs of technology of malware, is discussed. The system can detect signs of technology of malware such as peer to peer (P2P) communication, DDoS attack, Domain Generation Algorithm (DGA), and network scanning. The system consists of beneficial botnet and the R statistical computing system. The beneficial botnet is a group of Wiki servers, agent bots and analyzing bots. The script in a Wiki page of the Wiki server controls an agent bot or an analyzing bot. An agent bot is placed between a LAN and its gateway. It can capture every packet between hosts in the LAN and hosts behind the gateway from the LAN. An analyzing bot can be placed anywhere in the LAN or WAN if it can communicate with the Wiki server for controlling the analyzing bot. The analyzing bot has R statistical computing system and it can analyze data which is collected by agent bots.

Increasing number of Internet-scale applications, such as video streaming, incur huge amount of wide area traffic. Such traffic over the unreliable Internet without bandwidth guarantee suffers unpredictable network performance. This result, however, is unappealing to the application providers. Fortunately, Internet giants like Google and Microsoft are increasingly deploying their private wide area networks (WANs) to connect their global datacenters. Such high-speed private WANs are reliable, and can provide predictable network performance. In this paper, we propose a new type of service-inter-datacenter network as a service (iDaaS), where traditional application providers can reserve bandwidth from those Internet giants to guarantee their wide area traffic. Specifically, we design a bandwidth trading market among multiple iDaaS providers and application providers, and concentrate on the essential bandwidth pricing problem. The involved challenging issue is that the bandwidth price of each iDaaS provider is not only influenced by other iDaaS providers, but also affected by the application providers. To address this issue, we characterize the interaction between iDaaS providers and application providers using a Stackelberg game model, and analyze the existence and uniqueness of the equilibrium. We further present an efficient bandwidth pricing algorithm by blending the advantage of a geometrical Nash bargaining solution and the demand segmentation method. For comparison, we present two bandwidth reservation algorithms, where each iDaaS provider's bandwidth is reserved in a weighted fair manner and a max-min fair manner, respectively. Finally, we conduct comprehensive trace-driven experiments. The evaluation results show that our proposed algorithms not only ensure the revenue of iDaaS providers, but also provide bandwidth guarantee for application providers with lower bandwidth price per unit.

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a term applied to the industrial application of M2M devices. The security of IIoT devices is a difficult problem and where the automation of critical infrastructure is intended, risks may be unacceptable. Remote attacks are a significant threat and solutions are sought which are secure by default. The problem space may be analyzed using threat modelling methods. Software Defined Networks (SDN) provide mitigation for remote attacks which exploit local area networks. Similar concepts applied to the WAN may improve availability and performance and provide granular data on link characteristics. Schemes such as the Software Defined Perimeter allow IIoT devices to communicate on the Internet, mitigating avenues of remote attack. Finally, separation of duties at the IIoT device may prevent attacks on the integrity of the device or the confidentiality and integrity of its communications. Work remains to be done on the mitigation of DDoS.

QoS-based connectivity coordinated by the 5GEx Multi-domain Orchestrator exploiting novel stateful BRPC is demonstrated for the first time over a multi-operator multi-technology transport network within the European 5GEx Sandbox, including Segment Routing and optical domains.

Devices on the Internet of Things (IoT) are usually battery-powered and have limited resources. Hence, energy-efficient and lightweight protocols were designed for IoT devices, such as the popular Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP). Yet, CoAP itself does not include any defenses against denial-of-sleep attacks, which are attacks that aim at depriving victim devices of entering low-power sleep modes. For example, a denial-of-sleep attack against an IoT device that runs a CoAP server is to send plenty of CoAP messages to it, thereby forcing the IoT device to expend energy for receiving and processing these CoAP messages. All current security solutions for CoAP, namely Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS), IPsec, and OSCORE, fail to prevent such attacks. To fill this gap, Seitz et al. proposed a method for filtering out inauthentic and replayed CoAP messages "en-route" on 6LoWPAN border routers. In this paper, we expand on Seitz et al.'s proposal in two ways. First, we revise Seitz et al.'s software architecture so that 6LoWPAN border routers can not only check the authenticity and freshness of CoAP messages, but can also perform a wide range of further checks. Second, we propose a couple of such further checks, which, as compared to Seitz et al.'s original checks, more reliably protect IoT devices that run CoAP servers from remote denial-of-sleep attacks, as well as from remote exploits. We prototyped our solution and successfully tested its compatibility with Contiki-NG's CoAP implementation.

In recent years, IPv6 will gradually replace IPv4 with IPv4 address exhaustion and the rapid development of the Low-Power Wide-Area network (LPWAN) wireless communication technology. This paper proposes a data acquisition and application system based on 6LoWPAN and IPv6 transition technology. The system uses 6LoWPAN and 6to4 tunnel to realize integration of the internal sensor network and Internet to improve the adaptability of the gateway and reduce the average forwarding delay and packet loss rate of small data packet. Moreover, we design and implement the functions of device access management, multiservice data storage and affair data service by combining the C/S architecture with the actual uploaded river quality data. The system has the advantages of flexible networking, low power consumption, rich IPv6 address, high communication security, and strong reusability.

The number of sensors and embedded devices in an urban area can be on the order of thousands. New low-power wide area (LPWA) wireless network technologies have been proposed to support this large number of asynchronous, low-bandwidth devices. Among them, the Cooperative UltraNarrowband (C-UNB) is a clean-slate cellular network technology to connect these devices to a remote site or data collection server. C-UNB employs small bandwidth channels, and a lightweight random access protocol. In this paper, a new application is investigated - the use of C-UNB wireless networks to support the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), in order to facilitate the communication between smart meters and utilities. To this end, we adapted a mathematical model for C-UNB, and implemented a network simulation module in NS-3 to represent C-UNB's physical and medium access control layer. For the application layer, we implemented the DLMS-COSEM protocol, or Device Language Message Specification - Companion Specification for Energy Metering. Details of the simulation module are presented and we conclude that it supports the results of the mathematical model.

The existing radial topology makes the power system less reliable since any part in the system failure will disrupt electrical power delivery in the network. The increasing security concerns, electrical energy theft, and present advancement in Information and Communication Technologies are some factors that led to modernization of power system. In a smart grid, a network of smart sensors offers numerous opportunities that may include monitoring of power, consumer-side energy management, synchronization of dispersed power storage, and integrating sources of renewable energy. Smart sensor networks are low cost and are ease to deploy hence they are favorable contestants for deployment smart power grids at a larger scale. These networks will result in a colossal volume of dissimilar range of data that require an efficient processing and analyzing process in order to realize an efficient smart grid. The existing technology can be used to collect data but dealing with the collected information proficiently as well as mining valuable material out of it remains challenging. The paper investigates communication technologies that maybe deployed in a smart grid. In this paper simulations results for the Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel are illustrated. We propose a model and a communication network domain riding on the power system domain. The model was interrogated by simulation in MATLAB.

In Germany, as of 2017, a new smart metering infrastructure based on high security and privacy requirements will be deployed. It provides interfaces to connect meters for different commodities, to allow end users to retrieve the collected measurement data, to connect to the metering operators, and to connect Controllable Local Systems (CLSs) that establish a TLS secured connection to third parties in order to exchange data or for remote controlling of energy devices. This paper aims to connect industrial machines as CLS devices since it shows that the demands and main ideas of remotely controlled devices in the Smart Grid context and Industrial Cloud Applications match on the communication level. It describes the general architecture of the Smart Metering infrastructure in Germany, introduces the defined roles, depicts the configuration process on the different organizational levels, demonstrates the connection establishment and the initiating partners, concludes on the potential industrial use cases of this infrastructure, and provides open questions and room for further research.

This paper will suggest a robust method for a network layer Moving Target Defense (MTD) using symmetric packet scheduling rules. The MTD is implemented and tested on a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) network testbed. This method is shown to be efficient while providing security benefits to the issues faced by the static nature of SCADA networks. The proposed method is an automated tool that may provide defense in depth when be used in conjunction with other MTDs and traditional security devices.

Recently, the increase of interconnectivity has led to a rising amount of IoT enabled devices in botnets. Such botnets are currently used for large scale DDoS attacks. To keep track with these malicious activities, Honeypots have proven to be a vital tool. We developed and set up a distributed and highly-scalable WAN Honeypot with an attached backend infrastructure for sophisticated processing of the gathered data. For the processed data to be understandable we designed a graphical frontend that displays all relevant information that has been obtained from the data. We group attacks originating in a short period of time in one source as sessions. This enriches the data and enables a more in-depth analysis. We produced common statistics like usernames, passwords, username/password combinations, password lengths, originating country and more. From the information gathered, we were able to identify common dictionaries used for brute-force login attacks and other more sophisticated statistics like login attempts per session and attack efficiency.

SDN is a promising architecture that can overcome the challenges facing traditional networks. SDN enables administrator/operator to build a simpler, customizable, programmable, and manageable network. In software-defined WAN deployments, multiple controllers are often needed, and the location of these controllers affect various metrics. Since these metrics conflict each other, this problem can be regarded as a multi-objective combinatorial optimization problem (MOCO). A particular efficient method to solve a typical MOCO, which is used in the relevant literature, is to find the actual Pareto frontier first and give it to the decision maker to select the most appropriate solution(s). In small and medium sized combinatorial problems, evaluating the whole search space and find the exact Pareto frontier may be possible in a reasonable time. However, for large scale problems whose search spaces involves thousands of millions of solutions, the exhaustive evaluation needs a considerable amount of computational efforts and memory used. An effective alternative mechanism is to estimate the original Pareto frontier within a relatively small algorithm's runtime and memory consumption. Heuristic methods, which have been studied well in the literature, proved to be very effective methods in this regards. The second version of the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm, called NSGA-II has been carried out quite well on different discrete and continuous optimization problems. In this paper, we adapt this efficient mechanism for a new presented multi-objective model of the control placement problem [7]. The results of implementing the adapted algorithm carried out on the Internet2 OS3E network run on MATLAB 2013b confirmed its effectiveness.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged as a promising direction for next-generation network design. Due to its clean-slate and highly flexible design, it is believed to be the foundational principle for designing network architectures and improving their flexibility, resilience, reliability, and security. As the technology matures, research in both industry and academia has designed a considerable number of tools to scale software-defined networks, in preparation for the wide deployment in wide-area networks. In this paper, we survey the mechanisms that can be used to address the scalability issues in software-defined wide-area networks. Starting from a successful distributed system, the Domain Name System, we discuss the essential elements to make a large scale network infrastructure scalable. Then, the existing technologies proposed in the literature are reviewed in three categories: scaling out/up the data plane and scaling the control plane. We conclude with possible research directions towards scaling software-defined wide-area networks.

It is expected that clean-slate network designs will be implemented for wide-area network applications. Multi-tenancy in OpenFlow networks is an effective method to supporting a clean-slate network design, because the cost-effectiveness is improved by the sharing of substrate networks. To guarantee the programmability of OpenFlow for tenants, a complete flow space (i.e., header values of the data packets) virtualization is necessary. Wide-area substrate networks typically have multiple administrators. We therefore need to implement a flow space virtualization over multiple administration networks. In existing techniques, a third party is solely responsible for managing the mapping of header values for flow space virtualization for substrate network administrators and tenants, despite the severity of a third party failure. In this paper, we propose an AutoVFlow mechanism that allows flow space virtualization in a wide-area networks without the need for a third party. Substrate network administrators implement a flow space virtualization autonomously. They are responsible for virtualizing a flow space involving switches in their own substrate networks. Using a prototype of AutoVFlow, we measured the virtualization overhead, the results of which show a negligible amount of overhead.