Industrial cyber-physical systems (CPS) have gained enormous attention of manufacturers in recent years due to their automation and cost reduction capabilities in the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0). Such an industrial network of connected cyber and physical components may consist of highly expensive components such as robots. In order to provide efficient communication in such a network, it is imperative to improve the Quality-of-Service (QoS). Software Defined Networking (SDN) has become a key technology in realizing QoS concepts in a dynamic fashion by allowing a centralized controller to program each flow with a unified interface. However, state-of-the-art solutions do not effectively use the centralized visibility of SDN to fulfill QoS requirements of such industrial networks. In this paper, we propose an SDN-based routing mechanism which attempts to improve QoS in robotic cyber-physical systems which have hard real-time requirements. We exploit the SDN capabilities to dynamically select paths based on current link parameters in order to improve the QoS in such delay-constrained networks. We verify the efficiency of the proposed approach on a realistic industrial OpenFlow topology. Our experiments reveal that the proposed approach significantly outperforms an existing delay-based routing mechanism in terms of average throughput, end-to-end delay and jitter. The proposed solution would prove to be significant for the industrial applications in robotic cyber-physical systems.
In this work, we propose and experimentally assess the automatic and flexible NSs configurations of optical OPSquare DCN controlled and orchestrated by an extended SDN control plane for multi-tenant applications with differentiated QoS provisioning. Optical Flow Control (OFC) protocol has been developed to prevent packet losses at switch sides caused by packet contentions.Based on the collected resource topology of data plane, the optical network slices can be dynamically provisioned and automatically reconfigured by the SDN control plane. Meanwhile, experimental results validate that the prio…
Future cellular networks will be dense and require key traffic management technologies for fine-grained network control. The problem gets more complicated in the presence of different network segments with bottleneck links limiting the desired quality of service (QoS) delivery to the last mile user. In this work, we first design a framework for software-defined cellular networks (SDCN) and then propose new mechanisms for management of QoS and non-QoS users traffic considering both access and backhaul networks, jointly. The overall SDN-LTE system and related approaches are developed and tested …
Providing high-speed Internet service using satellite network has attracted researchers from both academia and industry mainly due to the characteristics of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks such as global coverage, scalability, and lower transmission delay. With the recent advancements in the Software-Defined Network (SDN), implementation of SDN in Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) can help to achieve the set goals for 5G and beyond networks. Since satellite networks have a distinct architecture, some of the traditional protocols no longer remain useful. Therefore, to satisfy the diverse …
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have rapidly progressed over the years, they are now applied in health care systems, home automation, security surveillance, disaster management and more. With this rapid growth in the number of users and applications leading to WSNs becoming increasingly complex, this growth makes high demands on WSNs to provide the requirements of every user and application that uses them. They have recently been envisioned to be integrated into Internet of Things (IoT), their role will be to provide sensing services to the ever increasing community of internet users. However …
In this paper, we propose an approach for the automated translation of application-level requirements regarding the logical workflow and its QoS into a configuration of the underlying network substrate. Our goal is to facilitate the integration of QoS constraints in the development of industrial IoT applications to make them more reliable. We follow an approach based on two semantic models: The first model allows to design the workflow of an IoT application and to express application-level QoS requirements on its interactions. The second model captures the configuration of a network and can be…
This paper presents the vision of the Control Exchange Point (CXP) architectural model. The model is motivated by the inflexibility and ossification of today's inter-domain routing system, which renders critical QoS-constrained end-to-end (e2e) network services difficult or simply impossible to provide. CXPs operate on slices of ISP networks and are built on basic Software Defined Networking (SDN) principles, such as the clean decoupling of the routing control plane from the data plane and the consequent logical centralization of control. The main goal of the architectural model is to provide …
Software-Defined Network (SDN) is expected to have a significant impact on future networking. Although exciting progress has been made toward realizing SDN, application of this new networking paradigm in the future Internet to support end-to-end QoS provisioning faces some new challenges. The autonomous network domains coexisting in the Internet and the diverse user applications deployed upon the Internet call for a uniform Service Delivery Platform (SDP) that enables high-level network abstraction and inter-domain collaboration for end-to-end service provisioning. However, the currently avail…
The Internet of Things (IoT) is advancing and the adoption of internet-connected devices in everyday use is constantly growing. This increase not only affects the traffic from other sources in the network, but also the communication quality requirements, like Quality of Service (QoS), for the IoT devices and applications. With the rise of dynamic network management and dynamic network programming technologies like Software-Defined Networking (SDN), traffic management and communication quality requirements can be tailored to fit niche use cases and characteristics. We propose a publish/subscrib…
Southwest Minzu University（西南民族大学）；UESTC（电子科技大学）；Temple University（天普大学）；University of Idaho（爱达荷大学）
With the ever growing diversity of devices and applications that will be connected to 5G networks, flexible and agile service orchestration with acknowledged QoE that satisfies end-user's functional and QoS requirements is necessary. SDN (Software-Defined Networking) and NFV (Network Function Virtualization) are considered key enabling technologies for 5G core networks. In this regard, this paper proposes a reinforcement learning based QoS/QoE-aware Service Function Chaining (SFC) in SDN/NFV-enabled 5G slices. First, it implements a lightweight QoS information collector based on LLDP, which wo…
Software-defined networking (SDN) as a new paradigm for networking provides efficient resource reallocation platform in emerging cloud data center networks. The dynamic nature of cloud data center network's traffic, as well as the existence of big flows make it necessary to periodically reprogram the network through the SDN controller. Therefore, it is critical for network researchers to minimize the side-effects of network reconfiguration. In this way, the most challenging issue is the number of rerouted flows that affect the network stability and QoS parameters. As a result, dynamic reconfig…
Failures in networks result in service disruptions which may cause deteriorated Quality of Service (QoS) for the end users. Since SDN is becoming the mainstream paradigm for networks, implementation of a robust fault tolerance scheme for SDN-based networks is crucial. Existing SDN data plane fault tolerance approaches can be classified as reactive and proactive which may or may not rely on the controller, respectively. However, none of them qualifies as a complete solution, providing only partial remedies. In this work, we propose Dynamic Protection with Quality of Alternative Paths (DPQoAP) t…
In this work, a new region-based, multipath-enabled packet routing is presented and called SmartPacket Routing. The proposed approach provides several opportunities to re-distribute the smartness and decision making among various elements of a network including the packets themselves toward providing a decentralized solution for SDNs. This would bring efficiency and scalability, and therefore also lower environmental footprint for the ever-growing networks. In particular, a region-based representation of the network topology is proposed which is then used to describe the routing actions along …
Most Software Defined Networks (SDN) traffic engineering applications use excessive and frequent global monitoring in order to find the optimal Quality-of-Service (QoS) paths for the current state of the network. In this work, we present the motivations, architecture and initial evaluation of a SDN application called Cognitive Routing Engine (CRE) which is able to find near-optimal paths for a user-specified QoS while using a very small monitoring overhead compared to global monitoring which is required to guarantee that optimal paths are found. Smaller monitoring overheads bring the advantage…
VirtuWind proposes the application of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) in critical infrastructure networks. We aim at introducing network programmability, reconfigurability and multi-tenant capability both inside isolated and inter-connected industrial networks. Henceforth, we present the design of the VirtuWind architecture that addresses the requirements of industrial communications: granular Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees, system modularity and secure and isolated per-tenant network access. We present the functional components of our architec…
Technical advances in ubiquitous sensing, embedded computing, and wireless communication are leading to a new generation of engineered systems called cyber-physical systems (CPS). CPS promises to transform the way we interact with the physical world just as the Internet transformed how we interact with one another. Before this vision becomes a reality, however, a large number of challenges have to be addressed. Network quality of service (QoS) management in this new realm is among those issues that deserve extensive research efforts. It is envisioned that wireless sensor/actuator networks (WSA…
Technical advances in networks, embedded computing, and wireless communications are leading to the next generation of complex intelligent systems called Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). CPS promises to transform the way we interact with the physical world. Efficient and reliable operation of the CTCS-3 (Chinese Train Control System Level 3) is great protection of the national economy and public safety. The CTCS-3 is based on GSM-R (GSM for Railway) to achieve a continuous and two-way transmission of information between ground and the train. To ensure the growing needs of safety, fastness and serv…
Service Function Chaining (SFC) allows the forwarding of a traffic flow along a chain of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs, e.g., IDS, firewall, and NAT). Software Defined Networking (SDN) solutions can be used to support SFC reducing the management complexity and the operational costs. One of the most critical issues for the service and network providers is the reduction of energy consumption, which should be achieved without impact to the quality of services. In this paper, we propose a novel resource (re)allocation architecture which enables energy-aware SFC for SDN-based networks. To this en…
Software Defined Network (SDN) is the next generation network that decouples the control plane from the data plane of forwarding devices by utilizing the OpenFlow protocol as a communication link between the data plane and the control plane. However, there are some security issues might be in actions on SDN that the attackers can take control over the SDN control plane. Thus, traffic measurement is a fundamental technique of protecting SDN against the high-security threats such as DDoS, heavy hitter, superspreader as well as live video calling, QoS control, high bandwidth requirement, resource…
In this letter the development and testing of an open enterprise Wi-Fi solution based on virtual APs, managed by a central WLAN controller is presented. It allows seamless handovers between APs in different channels, maintaining the QoS of real-time services. The potential scalability issues associated to the beacon generation and channel assignment have been addressed. A battery of tests has been run in a real environment, and the results are reported in terms of packet loss and delay.
Packet-level traffic measurement is essential in applications like QoS, traffic engineering, or anomaly detection. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) enables efficient and dynamic network configuration that we can deploy for fine-grained network state measurement. As the state changes dynamically, the sampling frequency must cope with that for accurate measurement. At the same time, we must consider the measurement cost, e.g., nodes' resource utilization. Existing works fall short in offering an optimal model to balance both the measurement accuracy and cost. We fill that gap by proposing ACE, …
The convergence of IT and OT technologies results in the need for efficient network management solutions for automotive and industrial automation environments. However, configuring real-time Ethernet networks while maintaining the desired QoS is challenging due to the dynamic nature of OT networks and the high configuration parameters. This paper introduces an SDN-based self-configuration framework for the fully automated configuration of TSN networks. Unlike standard TSN configuration, we remove end-host-related dependencies and put flows initially on default paths to extract traffic characte…
Software Defined Networking (SDN) offers a flexible and scalable architecture that abstracts decision making away from individual devices and provides a programmable network platform. However, implementing a centralized SDN architecture within the constraints of a low-power wireless network faces considerable challenges. Not only is controller traffic subject to jitter due to unreliable links and network contention, but the overhead generated by SDN can severely affect the performance of other traffic. This paper addresses the challenge of bringing high-overhead SDN architecture to IEEE 802.15…
Apart from mobile cellular networks, IEEE 802.11-based wireless local area networks (WLANs) represent the most widely deployed wireless networking technology. With the migration of critical applications onto data networks, and the emergence of multimedia applications such as digital audio/video and multimedia games, the success of IEEE 802.11 depends critically on its ability to provide quality of service (QoS). A lot of research has focused on equipping IEEE 802.11 WLANs with features to support QoS. In this survey, we provide an overview of these techniques. We discuss the QoS features incor…
The centralized architecture in software-defined network (SDN) provides a global view of the underlying network, paving the way for enormous research in the area of SDN traffic engineering (SDN TE). This research focuses on the load balancing aspects of SDN TE, given that the existing reactive methods for data-plane load balancing eventually result in packet loss and proactive schemes for data plane load balancing do not address congestion propagation. In the proposed work, the SDN controller periodically monitors flow level statistics and utilization on each link in the network and over-utili…
Software Defined Networking (SDN) has been recently introduced as a new communication paradigm in computer networks. By separating the control plane from the data plane and entrusting packet forwarding to straightforward switches, SDN makes it possible to deploy and run networks which are more flexible to manage and easier to configure. This paper describes a set of extensions for the INET framework, which allow researchers and network designers to simulate SDN architectures and evaluate their performance and security at design time. Together with performance evaluation and design optimization…
The importance of HTTP in today's networks isundisputed. As a solution to enhance QoS and enhance scalability CDN networks have been designed and deployed. Recently, anew paradigm known as ICN has been envisioned focusing the network routing on the content itself instead of the geographical attachment of addresses. Software Defined Networkings (SDNs) have been researched for the last 10 years as enablers of FutureInternet (FI) architectures in general and of ICN in particular. We have already proposed the Information Centric Network as a Service (ICNaaS) architecture to provide with end-to-end…
Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) in Software Defined Networks (SDN) emerged as a new technology for creating virtual instances for smooth execution of multiple applications. Their amalgamation provides flexible and programmable platforms to utilize the network resources for providing Quality of Service (QoS) to various applications. In SDN-enabled NFV setups, the underlying network services can be viewed as a series of virtual network functions (VNFs) and their optimal deployment on physical/virtual nodes is considered a challenging task to perform. However, SDNs have evolved from single…
Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a network architecture that aims at providing high flexibility through the separation of the network logic from the forwarding functions. The industry has already widely adopted SDN and researchers thoroughly analyzed its vulnerabilities, proposing solutions to improve its security. However, we believe important security aspects of SDN are still left uninvestigated. In this paper, we raise the concern of the possibility for an attacker to obtain knowledge about an SDN network. In particular, we introduce a novel attack, named Know Your Enemy (KYE), by means…
The emerging Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm separates the data plane from the control plane and centralizes network control in an SDN controller. Applications interact with controllers to implement network services, such as network transport with Quality of Service (QoS). SDN facilitates the virtualization of network functions so that multiple virtual networks can operate over a given installed physical network infrastructure. Due to the specific characteristics of optical (photonic) communication components and the high optical transmission capacities, SDN based optical networking…
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm provides many features including hardware abstraction, programmable networking and centralized policy control. One of the main benefits used along with these features is core/backhaul network virtualization which ensures sharing of mobile core and backhaul networks among Mobile Operators (MOs). In this paper, we propose a virtualized SDN-based Evolved Packet System (EPS) cellular network architecture including design of network virtualization controller. After virtualization of core/backhaul network elements, eNodeBs associated with MOs become a part …
Wireless sensor networks have been a driving force of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) advancement in the process control and manufacturing industry. The emergence of IIoT opens great potential for the ubiquitous field device connectivity and manageability with an integrated and standardized architecture from low-level device operations to high-level data-centric application interactions. This technological development requires software definability in the key architectural elements of IIoT, including wireless field devices, IIoT gateways, network infrastructure, and IIoT sensor cloud …
Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming an increasingly attractive target for cybercriminals. We observe that many attacks to IoTs are launched in a collusive way, such as brute-force hacking usernames and passwords, to target at a particular victim. However, most of the time our defending mechanisms to such kind of attacks are carried out individually and independently, which leads to ineffective and weak defense. To this end, we propose to leverage Software Defined Networks (SDN) to enable cooperative security for legacy IP-based IoT devices. SDN decouples control plane and data plane, and can …
Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Distributed Networking (SDN) technologies play a crucial role in enabling 5G system and beyond. A synergy between these both technologies has been identified for enabling a new concept dubbed service function chains (SFC) that aims to reduce both the capital expenditures (CAPEX) and operating expenses (OPEX). The SFC paradigm considers different constraints and key performance indicators (KPIs), that includes QoS and different resources, for enabling network slice services. However, the large-scale, complexity and security issues brought by th…
Detecting cyber attacks in the network environments used by Internet-of-things (IoT) and preventing them from causing physical perturbations play an important role in delivering dependable services. To achieve this goal, we propose in-network Honeypot based on Software-Defined Networking (SDN) to disrupt and mislead adversaries into exposures while they are in an early stage of preparing an attack. Different from traditional Honeypot requiring dedicated hardware setup, the in-network Honeypot directly reroutes traffic from suspicious nodes and intelligently spoofs the network traffic to them b…
The rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) has opened new research lines that focus on applying IoT applications to domains further beyond basic user-grade applications, such as Industry or Healthcare. These domains demand a very high Quality of Service (QoS), mainly a very short response time. In order to meet these demands, some works are evaluating how to modularize and deploy IoT applications in different nodes of the infrastructure (edge, fog, cloud), as well as how to place the network controllers, since these decisions affect the response time of the application. Some works in the literat…
With rapid advancements in sensing, networking, and computing technologies, recent years have witnessed the emergence of cyber-physical systems (CPS) in a broad range of application domains. CPS is a new class of engineered systems that features the integration of computation, communications, and control. In contrast to general-purpose computing systems, many cyber-physical applications are safety-cricial. These applications impose considerable requirements on quality of service (QoS) of the employed networking infrastruture. Since IEEE 802.15.4 has been widely considered as a suitable protoco…
In critical infrastructures, communication networks are used to exchange vital data among elements of Industrial Control Systems (ICSes). Due to the criticality of such systems and the increase of the cybersecurity risks in these contexts, best practices recommend the adoption of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSes) as monitoring facilities. The choice of the positions of IDSes is crucial to monitor as many streams of data traffic as possible. This is especially true for the traffic patterns of ICS networks, mostly confined in many subnetworks, which are geographically distributed and largely a…
Software-defined networking (SDN) is the concept of decoupling the control and data planes to create a flexible and agile network, assisted by a central controller. However, the performance of SDN highly depends on the limitations in the fronthaul which are inadequately discussed in the existing literature. In this paper, a fronthaul-aware software-defined resource allocation mechanism is proposed for 5G wireless networks with in-band wireless fronthaul constraints. Considering the fronthaul capacity, the controller maximizes the time-averaged network throughput by enforcing a coarse correlate…
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) revolutionize various application domains with integration and interoperability of networking, computing systems, and mechanical devices. Due to its scale and variety, CPS faces a number of challenges and opens up a few research questions in terms of management, fault-tolerance, and scalability. We propose a software-defined approach inspired by Software-Defined Networking (SDN), to address the challenges for a wider CPS adoption. We thus design a middleware architecture for the correct and resilient operation of CPS, to manage and coordinate the interacting device…
Vehicular networks are one of the cornerstone of an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). They are expected to provide ubiquitous network connectivity to moving vehicles while supporting various ITS services, some with very stringent requirements in terms of latency and reliability. Two vehicular networking technologies are envisioned to jointly support the full range of ITS services : DSRC (Dedicated Short Range Communication) for direct vehicle to vehicle/Road Side Units (RSU) communications and cellular technologies. To the best of our knowledge, approaches from the literature usually di…
A wireless sensor/actuator network (WSAN) is a group of sensors and actuators that are geographically distributed and interconnected by wireless networks. Sensors gather information about the state of physical world. Actuators react to this information by performing appropriate actions. WSANs thus enable cyber systems to monitor and manipulate the behavior of the physical world. WSANs are growing at a tremendous pace, just like the exploding evolution of Internet. Supporting quality of service (QoS) will be of critical importance for pervasive WSANs that serve as the network infrastructure of …
The current paper addresses relevant network security vulnerabilities introduced by network devices within the emerging paradigm of Internet of Things (IoT) as well as the urgent need to mitigate the negative effects of some types of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that try to explore those security weaknesses. We design and implement a Software-Defined Intrusion Detection System (IDS) that reactively impairs the attacks at its origin, ensuring the normal operation of the network infrastructure. Our proposal includes an IDS that automatically detects several DDoS attacks, and then…
Wireless access technologies have been extensively developed aiming to give users the ability to connect to their expected networks anytime, anywhere. This leads to an increment of the number of wireless interfaces integrated into a single mobile device, hence, it allows the device to be able to connect to multiple access networks. However, in some specific cases such as natural disasters, having an uncorrupted and timely information exchanging means is critical for affected victims to survive or to connect to the outside world. This is because the essential network infrastructures in these ca…
The static nature of current cyber systems has made them easy to be attacked and compromised. By constantly changing a system, Moving Target Defense (MTD) has provided a promising way to reduce or move the attack surface that is available for exploitation by an adversary. However, the current network- based MTD obfuscates networks indiscriminately that makes some networks key services, such as web and DNS services, unavailable, because many information of these services has to be opened to the outside and remain real without compromising their usability. Moreover, the indiscriminate obfuscatio…
Computer networks today typically do not provide any mechanisms to the users to learn, in a reliable manner, which paths have (and have not) been taken by their packets. Rather, it seems inevitable that as soon as a packet leaves the network card, the user is forced to trust the network provider to forward the packets as expected or agreed upon. This can be undesirable, especially in the light of today's trend toward more programmable networks: after a successful cyber attack on the network management system or Software-Defined Network (SDN) control plane, an adversary in principle has complet…
Nowadays, computation is playing an increasingly more important role in the future generation of computer and communication networks, as exemplified by the recent progress in software defined networking (SDN) for wired networks as well as cloud radio access networks (C-RAN) and mobile cloud computing (MCC) for wireless networks. This paper proposes a unified concept, i.e., computation diversity, to describe the impact and diverse forms of the computation resources on both wired and wireless communications. By linking the computation resources to the communication networks based on quality of s…
The Pacific Rim Application and Grid Middleware Assembly (PRAGMA) is an international community of researchers that actively collaborate to address problems and challenges of common interest in eScience. The PRAGMA Experimental Network Testbed (PRAGMA-ENT) was established with the goal of constructing an international software-defined network (SDN) testbed to offer the necessary networking support to the PRAGMA cyberinfrastructure. PRAGMA-ENT is isolated, and PRAGMA researchers have complete freedom to access network resources to develop, experiment, and evaluate new ideas without the concerns…
The Internet of Things (IoT) connected by Software Defined Networking (SDN) promises to bring great benefits to cyber-physical systems. However, the increased attack surface offered by the growing number of connected vulnerable devices and complex nature of SDN control plane applications could overturn the huge benefits of such a system. This paper addresses the vulnerability of some unspecified security flaw in the SDN control plane application (such as a zero-day software vulnerability) which can be exploited to insert malicious flow rules in the switch that do not match network policies. Sp…
