In this paper, we present a new traffic engineering (TE) software framework to analyze, configure, and optimize (with the aid of a linear programming solver) a network for service provisioning. The developed software tool is based on our new data-driven traffic engineering approach that analyzes a large volume of network configuration data generated given the user input. By analyzing the data, one can then make efficient decisions later when designing a traffic engineering solution. We focus on three well-known traffic engineering objective functions: minimum cost routing (MCR), load balancing (LB), and average delay (AD). With this new tool, one can answer numerous traffic engineering questions. For example, what are the differences among the three objective functions? What is the impact of an objective function on link utilization? How many candidate paths are enough to achieve optimality or near-optimality with respect to a specific objective. This new software tool allows us to conveniently perform various experiments and visualize the results for performance analysis. As case studies, this paper presents examples that answer the questions for two traffic engineering problems: (1) how many paths are required to obtain a solution that is within a few percent from the optimal solution and whether that number is fixed for any network size? (2) how the choice of single-path/multi-path routing affects the load in the network? For the first problem, it turns out that the number of paths needed to achieve optimality increases as the number of links in the network increases.
Traffic-Adaptive Per-Hop Multipath Routing in Multi-Hop UAV Networks
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；China Mobile Zijin (Jiangsu) Innovation Research Institute（中国移动紫金（江苏）创新研究院）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦大学玛丽女王学院）；China Telecom Beijing Research Institute（中国电信北京研究院）；Chongqing University（重庆大学）
This paper proposes AFMT, a packet scheduling algorithm to achieve adaptive flow-aware multipath tunnelling. AFMT has two unique properties. Firstly, it implements robust adaptive traffic splitting for the subtunnels. Secondly, it detects and schedules bursts of packets cohesively, a scheme that already enabled traffic splitting for load balancing with little to no packet reordering. Several NS-3 experiments over different network topologies show that AFMT successfully deals with changing path characteristics due to background traffic while increasing throughput and reliability.
Mobile nodes are typically equipped with multiple radios and can connect to multiple radio access networks (e.g. WiFi, LTE and 5G). Consequently, it is important to design mechanisms that efficiently manage multiple network interfaces for aggregating the capacity, steering of traffic flows or switching flows among multiple interfaces. While such multi-access solutions have the potential to increase the overall traffic throughput and communication reliability, the variable latencies on different access links introduce packet delay variation which has negative effect on the application quality o…
We propose an all-optical networking solution for a wide area network (WAN) based on the notion of multipoint-to-multipoint lightpaths that, for short, we call "multipaths". A multipath concentrates the traffic of a group of source nodes on a wavelength channel using an adapted MAC protocol and multicasts this traffic to a group of destination nodes that extract their own data from the confluent stream. The proposed network can be built using existing components and appears less complex and more efficient in terms of energy consumption than alternatives like OPS and OBS. The paper presents the…
There have been several approaches to provisioning traffic between core network nodes in Internet Service Provider (ISP) networks. Such approaches aim to minimize network delay, increase network capacity, and enhance network security services. MATE (Multipath Adaptive Traffic Engineering) protocol has been proposed for multipath adaptive traffic engineering between an ingress node (source) and an egress node (destination). Its novel idea is to avoid network congestion and attacks that might exist in edge and node disjoint paths between two core network nodes. This paper builds an adaptive, rob…
Named Data Networking (NDN) is a promising Future Internet architecture to support content distribution. Its inherent addressless routing paradigm brings valuable characteristics to improve the transmission robustness and efficiency, e.g. users are enabled to download content from multiple providers concurrently. However, multipath transmission NDN is different from that in Multipath TCP, i.e. the "paths" in NDN are transparent to and uncontrollable by users. To this end, the user controls the traffic on all transmission paths as an entirety, which leads to a noticeable problem of low bandwidt…
Multipath routing is a trivial way to exploit the path diversity to leverage the network throughput. Technologies such as OSPF ECMP use all the available paths in the network to forward traffic, however, we argue that is not necessary to do so to load balance the network. In this paper, we consider multipath routing with only a limited number of end-to-end paths for each source and destination, and found that this can still load balance the traffic. We devised an algorithm to select a few paths for each source-destination pair so that when all traffic are forwarded over these paths, we can ach…
Single path routing that is currently used in the internet routers,is easy to implement as it simplifies the routing tables and packet flow paths. However it is not optimal and has shortcomings in utilizing the network resources optimally, load balancing & fast recovery in case of faults (fault tolerance). The given algorithm resolves all these problems by using all possible multiple paths for transfer of information, while retaining loop-free property. We have proposed a new dynamic loop-free multipath routing algorithm which improves network throughput and network resource utilization, reduc…
Multipath-TCP receives a lot of attention recently and can potentially improve quality of service for both private and commercial users. It leverages the multiple available paths and send packets through all the available paths. The growing of Mutipath TCP has received a growing interest from both researchers who publish a growing number of articles on the topic and the vendors since Apple has decided to use Multipath TCP on its smartphones and tablets to support the Siri voice recognition application. In this paper, we study the performance of Multipath TCP from its impact on the stability of…
Several approaches have been proposed to the problem of provisioning traffic engineering between core network nodes in Internet Service Provider (ISP) networks. Such approaches aim to minimize network delay, increase capacity, and enhance security services between two core (relay) network nodes, an ingress node and an egress node. MATE (Multipath Adaptive Traffic Engineering) has been proposed for multipath adaptive traffic engineering between an ingress node (source) and an egress node (destination) to distribute the network flow among multiple disjoint paths. Its novel idea is to avoid netwo…
Most end devices are now equipped with multiple network interfaces. Applications can exploit all available interfaces and benefit from multipath transmission. Recently Multipath TCP (MPTCP) was proposed to implement multipath transmission at the transport layer and has attracted lots of attention from academia and industry. However, MPTCP only supports TCP-based applications and its multipath routing flexibility is limited. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of orchestrating multipath transmission from the network layer of end devices, and develop a Multipath IP (MPIP) design consis…
The Internet can be made more efficient and robust with hop-by-hop multipath routing: Each router on the path can split packets between multiple nexthops in order to 1) avoid failed links and 2) reduce traffic on congested links. Before deciding how to split traffic, one first needs to decide which nexthops to allow at each step. In this paper, we investigate the requirements and trade-offs for making this choice. Most related work chooses the viable nexthops by applying the "Downward Criterion", i.e., only adding nexthops that lead closer to the destination; or more generally by creating a Di…
We consider wireless networks in which multiple paths are available between each source and destination. We allow each source to split traffic among all of its available paths, and ask the question: how do we attain the lowest possible number of transmissions to support a given traffic matrix? Traffic bound in opposite directions over two wireless hops can utilize the ``reverse carpooling'' advantage of network coding in order to decrease the number of transmissions used. We call such coded hops as ``hyper-links''. With the reverse carpooling technique longer paths might be cheaper than shorte…
Multipath TCP, or MPTCP, is a widely-researched mechanism that allows a single application-level connection to be split to more than one TCP stream, and consequently more than one network interface, as opposed to the traditional TCP/IP model. Being a transport layer protocol, MPTCP can easily interact between the application using it and the network supporting it. However, MPTCP does not have control of its own route. Default IP routing behavior generally takes all traffic through the shortest or best-metric path. However, this behavior may actually cause paths to collide with each other, crea…
The main challenge in wireless sensor network is to improve the fault tolerance of each node and also provide an energy efficient fast data routing service. In this paper we propose an energy efficient node fault diagnosis and recovery for wireless sensor networks referred as fault tolerant multipath routing scheme for energy efficient wireless sensor network (FTMRS).The FTMRS is based on multipath data routing scheme. One shortest path is use for main data routing in FTMRS technique and other two backup paths are used as alternative path for faulty network and to handle the overloaded traffic…
Internet is composed of numbers of independent autonomous systems. BGP is used to disseminate reachability information and establishing path between autonomous systems. Each autonomous system is allowed to select a single route to a destination and then export the selected route to its neighbors. The selection of single best route imposes restrictions on the use of alternative paths during interdomain link failure and thus, incurred packet loss. Packet loss still occurs even when multiple paths exist between source and destination but these paths have not been utilized. To minimize the packet …
Multipath TCP (MPTCP) is a standardized TCP extension which allows end-hosts to simultaneously exploit all of their network interfaces. The recent proliferation of dual-SIM mobile phones makes multi-LTE MPTCP setup an attractive option. We perform extensive measurements of MPTCP over two LTE connections in low and high-speed mobility scenarios over five months, both in controlled and in-the-wild environments. Our findings indicate that MPTCP performance decreases at high speeds due to increased frequency of signal strength drops and handovers. Both LTE paths experience frequent changes which r…
In the paper, a new mechanism for Software-Defined Networking (SDN) flow aggregation accompanied with multipath transmission is proposed. The aggregation results in a low number of flow entries in core switches. This type of scalability improvement of flow processing is obtained thanks to application of the procedure based on introduction of centrally managed MPLS label distribution performed by an SDN controller. Moreover, multipath transmission improves network resource utilization. The proposed mechanism does not involve definition of new protocols. It neither needs application of legacy si…
We use random linear network coding (RLNC) based scheme for multipath communication in the presence of lossy links with different delay characteristics to obtain ultra-reliability and low latency. A sliding window version of RLNC is proposed where the coded packets are generated using packets in a window size and are inserted among systematic packets in different paths. The packets are scheduled in the paths in a round robin fashion proportional to the data rates. We use finite encoding and decoding window size and do not rely on feedback for closing the sliding window, unlike the previous wor…
Wireless sensor networks sense and monitor real-time events. They supervise a geographic area where a phenomenon is to be monitored. The data in sensor networks have different levels of priority and hence their criticality differs. In order to keep up the real time commitment, the applications need higher transmission rates and reliability in information delivery. In this work we propose a multipath routing algorithm which enables the reliable delivery of data. By controlling the scheduling rate, it is possible to prevent congestion and packet loss in the network. The algorithm provides an eff…
Even real time video telephony services have been pervasively applied, providing satisfactory quality of experience to users is still a challenge task especially in wireless networks. Multipath transmission is a promising solution to improve video quality by aggregating bandwidth. In existing multipath transmission solutions, sender concurrently splits traffic on default routing paths and has no flexibility to select paths. When default paths fall into severe congestion and the available bandwidth decreases, sender has to decrease video quality by reducing resolution or encoding bitrate. Deplo…
Most of multipath multimedia streaming proposals use Forward Error Correction (FEC) approach to protect from packet losses. However, FEC does not sustain well burst of losses even when packets from a given FEC block are spread over multiple paths. In this article, we propose an online multipath convolutional coding for real-time multipath streaming based on an on-the-fly coding scheme called Tetrys. We evaluate the benefits brought out by this coding scheme inside an existing FEC multipath load splitting proposal known as Encoded Multipath Streaming (EMS). We demonstrate that Tetrys consistent…
Multipath routing is useful for networks to achieve load sharing among multiple routing paths. Multipath BGP (MBGP) is a technique to realize inter-domain multipath routing by enabling a BGP router to install multiple equally-good routes to a destination prefix. Most of previous works did not distinguish between intra-domain and inter-domain multipath routing. In this paper, we present a measurement study on the deployment of M-BGP in a large Internet service provider (ISP) network. Our method combines control-plane BGP measurements using Looking Glasses (LG), and data-plane traceroute measure…
Mobile Ad hoc Networks are highly dynamic networks. Quality of Service (QoS) routing in such networks is usually limited by the network breakage due to either node mobility or energy depletion of the mobile nodes. Also, to fulfill certain quality parameters, presence of multiple node-disjoint paths becomes essential. Such paths aid in the optimal traffic distribution and reliability in case of path breakages. Thus, to cater various challenges in QoS routing in Mobile Add hoc Networks, a Node Disjoint Multipath Routing Considering Link and Node Stability (NDMLNR) protocol has been proposed by t…
Millimeter wave (mmWave) communications provide great potential for next-generation cellular networks to meet the demands of fast-growing mobile data traffic with plentiful spectrum available. However, in a mmWave cellular system, the shadowing and blockage effects lead to the intermittent connectivity, and the handovers are more frequent. This paper investigates an ``all-mmWave'' cloud radio access network (cloud-RAN), in which both the fronthaul and the radio access links operate at mmWave. To address the intermittent transmissions, we allow the mobile users (MUs) to establish multiple conne…
To optimize the flow of traffic in IP networks, operators do traffic engineering (TE), i.e., tune routing-protocol parameters in response to traffic demands. TE in IP networks typically involves configuring static link weights and splitting traffic between the resulting shortest-paths via the Equal-Cost-MultiPath (ECMP) mechanism. Unfortunately, ECMP is a notoriously cumbersome and indirect means for optimizing traffic flow, often leading to poor network performance. Also, obtaining accurate knowledge of traffic demands as the input to TE is elusive, and traffic conditions can be highly variab…
State-of-the-art Internet traffic engineering uses source-based explicit routing via MPLS or Segment Routing. Though widely adopted in practice, source routing can face certain inefficiencies and operational issues, caused by its use of bandwidth reservations. In this work, we make the case for Hop-by-Hop (HBH) Traffic Engineering: splitting traffic among nexthops at every router, rather than splitting traffic among paths only at edge routers. We show that HBH traffic engineering can achieve the original goals of MPLS (i.e., efficient use of network resources), with a much simpler design that …
Today, most devices have multiple network interfaces. Coupled with wide-spread replication of popular content at multiple locations, this provides substantial path diversity in the Internet. We propose Multi-source Multipath HTTP, mHTTP, which takes advantage of all existing types of path diversity in the Internet. mHTTP needs only client-side but not server-side or network modifications as it is a receiver-oriented mechanism. Moreover, the modifications are restricted to the socket interface. Thus, no changes are needed to the applications or to the kernel. As mHTTP relies on HTTP range reque…
As the needs of Internet users and applications significantly changed over the last decade, inter-domain routing became more important to fulfill these needs. The ways how data flows over the Internet are still completely in the hand of network operators, who optimize traffic according to their own, local view of the network. We observe two potential limitations from this: Optimizing according to the local view may a) result in unused capacities in the global network and b) not meet the actual needs of users and applications. To identify and overcome these limitations, we present our BitTorren…
Predicting the current backlog, or traffic load, in framed-ALOHA networks enables the optimization of resource allocation, e.g., of the frame size. However, this prediction is made difficult by the lack of information about the cardinality of collisions and by possibly complex packet generation statistics. Assuming no prior information about the traffic model, apart from a bound on its temporal memory, this paper develops an online learning-based adaptive traffic load prediction method that is based on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) and specifically on the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) archit…
Being an integral part of the network traffic, nowadays it's vital to design robust mechanisms to provide QoS for multimedia applications. The main goal of this paper is to provide an efficient solution to support content-aware video transmission mechanism with buffer underflow avoidance at the receiver in multipath networks. Towards this, we introduce a content-aware time-varying utility function, where the quality impacts of video content is incorporated into its definition. Using the proposed utility function, we formulate a multipath Dynamic Network Utility Maximization (DNUM) problem for …
Super point is a special kind of host whose cardinality, the number of contacting hosts in a certain period, is bigger than a threshold. Super point cardinality estimation plays important roles in network field. This paper proposes a super point cardinality estimation algorithm under sliding time window. To maintain the state of previous hosts with few updating operations, a novel counter, asynchronous time stamp (AT), is proposed. For a sliding time window containing k time slices, AT only needs to be updated every k time slices at the cost of 1 more bit than a previous state-of-art counter w…
Institute of Information Science and Technologies (ISTI), CNR（意大利国家研究委员会信息科学与技术研究所）；CNIT - National Inter-University Consortium for Telecommunications（全国大学间电信联盟）；University of Pisa（比萨大学）
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has recently found wide applications in network traffic management and control because some of its variants do not require prior knowledge of network models. In this paper, we present a novel scheduler for real-time multimedia delivery in multipath systems based on an Actor-Critic (AC) RL algorithm. We focus on a challenging scenario of real-time video streaming from an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) using multiple wireless paths. The scheduler acting as an RL agent learns in real-time the optimal policy for path selection, path rate allocation and redundancy estimat…
Super point is a special host in network which communicates with lots of other hosts in a certain time period. The number of hosts contacting with a super point is called as its cardinality. Cardinality estimating plays important roles in network management and security. All of existing works focus on how to estimate super point's cardinality under discrete time window. But discrete time window causes great delay and the accuracy of estimating result is subject to the starting of the window. sliding time window, moving forwarding a small slice every time, offers a more accuracy and timely scal…
Generally traffic and the sensor network security have many challenges in the transmission of data in the network. The existing schemes consider homogeneous sensor networks which have poor performance and scalability. Due to many-to-one traffic pattern, sensors may communicate with small portion of its neighbours. Key management is the critical process in sensor nodes to secure the data. Most existing schemes establish shared keys for all the sensors no matter whether they are communicating or not. Hence it leads to large storage overhead. Another problem in sensor network is compromised node …
Cardinality estimation algorithms receive a stream of elements, with possible repetitions, and return the number of distinct elements in the stream. Such algorithms seek to minimize the required memory and CPU resource consumption at the price of inaccuracy in their output. In computer networks, cardinality estimation algorithms are mainly used for counting the number of distinct flows, and they are divided into two categories: sketching algorithms and sampling algorithms. Sketching algorithms require the processing of all packets, and they are therefore usually implemented by dedicated hardwa…
Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging technology of efficiently controlling and managing computer networks, such as in data centres, Wide Area Networks (WANs), as well as in ubiquitous communication. In this paper, we explore the idea of embedding the SDN components, represented by SDN controller and virtual switch, in end-hosts to improve network performance. In particular, we consider load balancing across multiple network interfaces on end-hosts with different link capacity scenarios. We have explored and implemented different SDN-based load balancing approaches based on OpenFlow…
Data center networks leverage multiple parallel paths connecting end host pairs to offer high bisection bandwidth for cluster computing applications. However, state of the art distributed multi-pathing protocols such as Equal Cost Multipath (ECMP) use static flow-to-link assignment, which is load-oblivious. They may cause bandwidth loss due to \emph{flow collisions} on a same link. Recently proposed centralized scheduling algorithm or host-based multi-pathing may suffer from scalability problems. In this paper, we present Distributed Flow Scheduling (DiFS) for data center networks, which is a …
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks represent a persistent threat to modern telecommunications networks: detecting and counteracting them is still a crucial unresolved challenge for network operators. DDoS attack detection is usually carried out in one or more central nodes that collect significant amounts of monitoring data from networking devices, potentially creating issues related to network overload or delay in detection. The dawn of programmable data planes in Software-Defined Networks can help mitigate this issue, opening the door to the detection of DDoS attacks directly in th…
Internet-of-things (IoT), with the vision of billions of connected devices, is bringing a massively heterogeneous character to wireless connectivity in unlicensed bands. The heterogeneity in medium access parameters, transmit power and activity levels among the coexisting networks leads to detrimental cross-technology interference. The stochastic traffic distributions, shaped under CSMA/CA rules, of an interfering network and channel fading makes it challenging to model and analyze the performance of an interfered network. In this paper, to study the temporal interaction between the traffic di…
Traffic load-balancing in datacenters alleviates hot spots and improves network utilization. In this paper, a stable in-network load-balancing algorithm is developed in the setting of software-defined networking. A control plane configures a data plane over successive intervals of time. While the MaxWeight algorithm can be applied in this setting and offers certain throughput optimality properties, its bang-bang control structure rewards single flows on each interval and prohibits link-capacity sharing. This paper develops a new algorithm that is throughput-optimal and allows link-capacity sha…
Machine-to-Machine (M2M) networks are an emerging technology with applications in numerous areas including smart grids, smart cities, vehicular telematics, and healthcare. In this paper, we design two estimation protocols for rapidly obtaining separate estimates of the number of active nodes of each traffic type in a heterogeneous M2M network with $T$ types of M2M nodes (e.g., those that send emergency, periodic, normal type data etc), where $T \geq 2$ is an arbitrary integer. One of these protocols, Method I, is a simple scheme, and the other, Method II, is more sophisticated and performs bet…
Volumetric distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks have become one of the most significant threats to modern telecommunication networks. However, most existing defense systems require that detection software operates from a centralized monitoring collector, leading to increased traffic load and delayed response. The recent advent of Data Plane Programmability (DPP) enables an alternative solution: threshold-based volumetric DDoS detection can be performed directly in programmable switches to skim only potentially hazardous traffic, to be analyzed in depth at the controller. In this paper,…
In current Data Center Networks (DCNs), Equal- Cost MultiPath (ECMP) is used as the de-facto routing protocol. However, ECMP does not differentiate between short and long flows, the two main categories of flows depending on their duration (lifetime). This issue causes hot-spots in the network, affecting negatively the Flow Completion Time (FCT) and the throughput, the two key performance metrics in data center networks. Previous work on load balancing proposed solutions such as splitting long flows into short flows, using per-packet forwarding approaches, and isolating the paths of short and l…
Data center networks offer multiple disjoint paths between Top-of-Rack (ToR) switches to connect server racks providing large bisection bandwidth. An effective load-balancing mechanism is required in order to fully utilize the available capacity of the multiple paths. While packet-based load-balancing can achieve high utilization, it suffers from reordering. Flow-based load-balancing such as equal-cost multipath routing (ECMP) spreads traffic uniformly across multiple paths leading to frequent hash collisions and suboptimal performance. Finally, flowlet based load-balancing such as CONGA or HU…
Forwarding decisions in classical IP-based networks are predetermined by routing. This is necessary to avoid loops, inhibiting opportunities to implement an adaptive and intelligent forwarding plane. Consequently, content distribution efficiency is reduced due to a lack of inherent multi-path transmission. In Named Data Networking (NDN) instead, routing shall hold a supporting role to forwarding, providing sufficient potential to enhance content dissemination at the forwarding plane. In this paper we design, implement, and evaluate a novel probability-based forwarding strategy, called Stochast…
Internal routing inside an ISP network is the foundation for lots of services that generate revenue from the ISP's customers. A fine-grained control of paths taken by network traffic once it enters the ISP's network is therefore a crucial means to achieve a top-quality offer and, equally important, to enforce SLAs. Many widespread network technologies and approaches (most notably, MPLS) offer limited (e.g., with RSVP-TE), tricky (e.g., with OSPF metrics), or no control on internal routing paths. On the other hand, recent advances in the research community are a good starting point to address t…
Distributed contention based Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols are the fundamental components for IEEE 802.11 based Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). Contention windows (CW) change dynamically to adapt to the current contention level, Upon each packet collision, a station doubles its CW to reduce further collision of packets. IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) suffers from a common problem in erroneous channel. They cannot distinguish noise lost packets from collision lost packets. In both situations a station does not receive its ACK and doubles the CW to reduce furth…
