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International audience; 5G enhanced Mobile broadband (eMBB) aims to provide users with a peak data rate of 20 Gbps in the Radio Access Network (RAN). However, since most Congestion Control Algorithms (CCAs) rely on startup and probe phases to discover the bottleneck bandwidth, they cannot quickly utilize the available RAN bandwidth and adapt to fast capacity changes without introducing large delay increase, especially when multiple flows are sharing the same Radio Link Control (RLC) buffer. To tackle this issue, we propose RAPID, a RANaware proxy-based flow control mechanism that prevents CCAs from overshooting more than the available RAN capacity while allowing near optimal link utilization. Based on analysis of up-todate radio information using Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) services and packet arrival rates, RAPID is able to differentiate slow interactive flows from fast download flows and allocate the available bandwidth accordingly. Our experiments with concurrent Cubic and BBR flows show that RAPID can reduce delay increase by a factor of 10 to 50 in both Line-of-Sight (LOS) and Non-LOS (NLOS) conditions while preserving high throughput.

Internet Coordinate Systems, shortly ICS, (e.g. [9] [8]) have been proposed to allow for distance (Round-Trip Time, shortly RTT) estimation between nodes, in order to reduce the measurement overhead of many applications and overlay networks. Indeed, by embedding the Internet delay space into a metric space – an operation that only requires each node in the system to measure delays to a small set of other nodes (its neighbors), nodes are attributed coordinates that can then be used to estimate the RTT between any two nodes, without further measurements, simply by applying the distance function associated with the chosen metric space to the nodes’ coordinates. Recent works have shown how coordinate-embedding services could be vulnerable to malicious attacks, providing a potentially attractive fertile ground for the disruption or collapse of the many applications and overlays that would use these services [2]. There are actually two obvious ways to disrupt the operation of a coordinate based system. First when requested to give its coordinate for a distance estimation at the application-level, a malicious node could simply and blatantly lie. Second, a malicious node, or even a colluding group, may aim at disrupting the embedding process itself. This latter strategy is very insidious and effective as it can result in important distortions of the coordinate space which then spoils the coordinate computations of many nodes (malicious and honest alike) [2]. This chapter focuses on developing and studying generic Kalman filter-based methods to secure the coordinate embedding process. More precisely, the embedding process, regardless of the actual coordinate-based positioning system, works on the premise that nodes adjust their coordinate based on some comparison between measured and estimated distances to some other nodes. Malicious nodes can interfere with this embedding process by, amongst other things, lying about their real coordinate and/or tampering with measurement probes, to create a discrepancy between measured and estimated latencies, so that unsuspecting nodes would wrongly adjust their own coordinate in a bid to reduce the difference [1]. Because the load on the network naturally varies in time, so does latency between pair of nodes, and as a Source: Kalman Filter, Book edited by: Vedran Kordic, ISBN 978-953-307-094-0, pp. 390, May 2010, INTECH, Croatia, downloaded from SCIYO.COM

International audience; There has been a considerable increase in the demand for high quality mobile video streaming services, while at the same time, the video traffic volume is expected to grow exponentially. Consequently, maintaining high quality of experience (QoE) and saving network resources are becoming crucial challenges to solve. In this paper, we propose a name-based mobile streaming scheme that allows efficient video content delivery by exploiting a smart pulling mechanism designed for information-centric networks (ICNs). The proposed mechanism enables fast packet loss recovery by leveraging in-network caching and coding. Through an experimental evaluation of our mechanism over an open wireless testbed and the Internet, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme leads to higher QoE levels than classical ICN and TCP-based streaming mechanisms.

International audience; ISP networks are taking a leap forward thanks to emerging technologies such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). Efficient algorithms considered too hard to be put in practice on legacy networks now have a second chance to be considered again. In this context, we rethink the ISP network dimensioning problem with protection against Shared Risk Link Group (SLRG) failures. We consider a path-based protection scheme with a global rerouting strategy in which, for each failure situation, we may have a new routing of all the demands. Our optimization task is to minimize the needed amount of bandwidth. We develop a scalable mathematical model that we handle using the Column Generation technique. We show the effectiveness of our methods and demonstrate the feasibility of our approach using Mininet.

Information-centric networking (ICN) is a promising solution for most of Internet applications where the content represents the core of the application. However, the proposed solutions for the ICN architecture are associated with many complexities including pervasive caching in the Internet and incompatibility with legacy IP networks, so the deployment of ICN in real networks is still an open problem. In this paper, we propose a backward-compatible ICN architecture to address the caching issue in particular. The key idea is implementing edge caching in ICN, using a coalition of end clients and edge servers. Our solution can be deployed in IP networks with HTTP requests. We performed a trace-driven simulation for analyzing peer-assisted information-centric networking (PICN) benefits using IRCache and Berkeley trace files. The results show that on average, PICN decreases the latency for 78% and increases the content retrieval speed for 69% compared with a direct download from the original Web servers. When comparing PICN with a solution based on central proxy servers, we show that the hit ratio obtained using a small cache size in each PICN client is almost 14% higher than the hit ratio obtained with a central proxy server using an unlimited cache storage.

International audience; In this paper, we build upon our prior work on D2-ITS, a flexible and extensible framework to dynamically distribute network control to enable message dissemination in Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS), and extend it with handover and load balancing capabilities. More specifically, D2-ITS' new handover feature allows a controller to automatically "delegate" control of a vehicle to another controller as the vehicle moves. Control delegation can also be used as a way to balance load among controllers and ensure that required application quality of service is maintained. We showcase D2-ITS' handover and load-balancing features using the Mininet-Wifi network simula-tor/emulator. Our preliminary experiments show D2-ITS' ability to seamlessly handover control of vehicles as they move.

International audience; —New applications where anyone can broadcast high quality video are becoming very popular. ISPs may take the opportunity to propose new high quality multicast services to their clients. Because of its centralized control plane, Software Defined Networking (SDN) enables the deployment of such a service in a flexible and bandwidth-efficient way. But deploying large-scale multicast services on SDN requires smart group membership management and a bandwidth reservation mechanism with QoS guarantees that should neither waste bandwidth nor impact too severely best effort traffic. In this paper, we propose; (1) a scalable multicast group management mechanism based on a Network Function Virtualization (NFV) approach for Software Defined ISP networks to implement and deploy multicast services on the network edge, and (2) the Lazy Load Balancing Multicast (L2BM) routing algorithm for sharing the core network capacity in a friendly way between guaranteed-bandwidth multicast traffic and best-effort traffic and that does not require costly real-time monitoring of link utilization. We have implemented the mechanism and algorithm, and evaluated them both in a simulator and a testbed. In the testbed, we experimented the group management at the edge and L2BM in the core with an Open vSwitch based QoS framework and evaluated the performance of L2BM with an exhaustive set of experiments on various realistic scenarios. The results show that L2BM outperforms other state-of-the art algorithms by being less aggressive with best-effort traffic and accepting about 5-15% more guaranteed-bandwidth multicast join requests.

We describe a demonstration run on R2lab, an anechoic chamber located at Inria Sophia Antipolis, France. The demonstration consists in deploying a standalone 5G network in less than 5 minutes. All the network components (base station, subscriber management, serving and packet gateways, network traffic analyzers) were run automatically using the nepi-ng experiment orchestration tool. Download and upload performance to the Internet from a commercial phone located in the anechoic chamber are shown.

International audience; New applications where anyone can broadcast video are becoming very popular on smartphones. With the advent of high definition video, ISP providers may take the opportunity to propose new high quality broadcast services to their clients. Because of its centralized control plane, Software Defined Networking (SDN) seems an ideal way to deploy such a service in a flexible and bandwidth-efficient way. But deploying large scale multicast services on SDN requires smart group membership management and a bandwidth reservation mechanism to support QoS guarantees that should neither waste bandwidth nor impact too severely best effort traffic. In this paper, we propose a Network Function Virtualization based solution for Software Defined ISP networks to implement scalable multicast group management. Then, we propose the Lazy Load balancing Multicast (L2BM) routing algorithm for sharing the network capacity in a friendly way between guaranteed-bandwidth multicast traffic and best-effort traffic. Our implementation of the framework made on Floodlight controllers and Open vSwitches is used to study the performance of L2BM.

International audience; Owing to the rapid growth in high-quality video streaming over the Internet, preserving high-level robustness against data loss and low latency, while maintaining higher data transmission rates, is becoming an increasingly important issue for high-quality real-time delay-sensitive streaming. In this paper, we propose a low latency, low loss streaming mechanism, L4C2, convenient for high-quality delay-sensitive streaming. With L4C2, nodes in the network estimate the acceptable delay and packet loss probability in their uplinks, aiming at retrieving lost data packets from in-network cache and/or coded data packets using in-network coding within an acceptable delay, by extending the Content-Centric Networking (CCN) approach. Further, L4C2 naturally provides multiple paths and multicast technologies to efficiently utilize network resources while sharing network resources fairly with competing data flows by adjusting the video quality when necessary. We validate through comprehensive simulations that L4C2 achieves a high success probability of data transmission considering the acceptable one-way delay, and higher QoE while suppressing the interest and redundant data traffic than the proposed multipath congestion control mechanism in CCN.

Nowadays, content retrieval is marking the Internet usage. User communications are no longer tied up to host interconnection. Information Centric Networking (ICN) models are proposed to cope with these changes. The new paradigm redesigns the Internet architecture to bring out content to the first level. Over the last decade, many key projects have proposed a large solution spectrum to rebuilt networking primitives focused on the content. One important and direct challenge of this shift is the large amount of routing states due to identifying contents rather than hosts. In this paper, we focus especially on DONA, one of the first ICN architecture, and analyse the required memory space to store routing states. Our study shows that today's technologies are not able to satisfy the content routing needs. Thus, we propose an enhancement of DONA called BADONA to deal with this problem. It uses the Bloom filter to drastically reduce the usage of the memory space. Finally, we evaluate our proposal performances to underscore its contribution.

We present an efficient message delivery framework, called MeDeHa, which enables communication in an internet connecting heterogeneous networks that is prone to disruptions in connectivity. MeDeHa is complementary to the IRTF's Bundle Architecture: besides its ability to store messages for unavailable destinations, MeDeHa can bridge the connectivity gap between infrastructure-based and multi-hop infrastructure-less networks. It benefits from network heterogeneity (e.g., nodes supporting more than one network and nodes having diverse resources) to improve message delivery. For example, in IEEE 802.11 networks, participating nodes may use both infrastructure- and ad-hoc modes to deliver data to otherwise unavailable destinations. It also employs opportunistic routing to support nodes with episodic connectivity. One of MeDeHa's key features is that any MeDeHa node can relay data to any destination and can act as a gateway to make two networks inter-operate or to connect to the backbone network. The network is able to store data destined to temporarily unavailable nodes till the time of their expiry. This time period depends upon current storage availability as well as quality-of-service needs (e.g., delivery delay bounds) imposed by the application. We showcase MeDeHa's ability to operate in environments consisting of a diverse set of interconnected networks and evaluate its performance through extensive simulations using a variety of scenarios with realistic synthetic and real mobility traces. Our results show significant improvement in average delivery ratio and a significant decrease in average delivery delay in the face of episodic connectivity. We also demonstrate that MeDeHa supports different levels of quality-of-service through traffic differentiation and message prioritization.

Communication networks, whether they are wired or wireless, have traditionally been assumed to be connected at least most of the time. However, emerging applications such as emergency response, special operations, smart environments, VANETs, etc. coupled with node heterogeneity and volatile links (e.g. due to wireless propagation phenomena and node mobility) will likely change the typical conditions under which networks operate. In fact, in such scenarios, networks may be mostly disconnected, i.e., most of the time, end-to-end paths connecting every node pair do not exist. To cope with frequent, long-lived disconnections, opportunistic routing techniques have been proposed in which, at every hop, a node decides whether it should forward or store-and-carry a message. Despite a growing number of such proposals, there still exists little consensus on the most suitable routing algorithm(s) in this context. One of the reasons is the large diversity of emerging wireless applications and networks exhibiting such “episodic” connectivity. These networks often have very different characteristics and requirements, making it very difficult, if not impossible, to design a routing solution that fits all. In this paper, we first break up existing routing strategies into a small number of common and tunable routing modules (e.g. message replication, coding, etc.), and then show how and when a given routing module should be used, depending on the set of network characteristics exhibited by the wireless application. We further attempt to create a taxonomy for intermittently connected networks. We try to identify generic network characteristics that are relevant to the routing process (e.g., network density, node heterogeneity, mobility patterns) and dissect different “challenged” wireless networks or applications based on these characteristics. Our goal is to identify a set of useful design guidelines that will enable one to choose an appropriate routing protocol for the application or network in hand. Finally, to demonstrate the utility of our approach, we take up some case studies of challenged wireless networks, and validate some of our routing design principles using simulations.

The analysis and evaluation of new wireless network protocols is a long process that requires mathematical analysis, simulations, and increasingly experimentations under real conditions. Measurements are essential to analyze the performance of wireless protocols such as IEEE 802.11 networks in real environments, but experimentations are complex to perform and analyze. Usually, network researchers develop their own tools, sometimes from scratch, to fit the requirements of their experimentations, and these tools are then abandoned when the paper is published. In this study, we emphasize the importance, for the network research community, to use and contribute to the development of open source measurement tools. In this regard, we propose a survey and classification of IEEE 802.11 wireless parameters and open source tools available to collect or estimate these parameters. We highlight the parameters that can be extracted from wireless traffic probes and those that are available through the driver of wireless cards. Then, we introduce and compare open source tools that can be used to make the measurements, with special attention to the flexibility of the tools and their application scope. Finally, we discuss with several case studies the combination of tools that best suit the needs of the wireless experiments and provide a list of common pitfalls to avoid.

Communication networks are traditionally assumed to be connected. However, emerging wireless applications such as vehicular networks, pocket-switched networks, etc., coupled with volatile links, node mobility, and power outages, will require the network to operate despite frequent disconnections. To this end, opportunistic routing techniques have been proposed, where a node may store-and-carry a message for some time, until a new forwarding opportunity arises. Although a number of such algorithms exist, most focus on relatively homogeneous settings of nodes. However, in many envisioned applications, participating nodes might include handhelds, vehicles, sensors, etc. These various "classesrdquo have diverse characteristics and mobility patterns, and will contribute quite differently to the routing process. In this paper, we address the problem of routing in intermittently connected wireless networks comprising multiple classes of nodes. We show that proposed solutions, which perform well in homogeneous scenarios, are not as competent in this setting. To this end, we propose a class of routing schemes that can identify the nodes of "highest utilityrdquo for routing, improving the delay and delivery ratio by four to five times. Additionally, we propose an analytical framework based on fluid models that can be used to analyze the performance of various opportunistic routing strategies, in heterogeneous settings.

In upcoming very high-speed wireless LANs (WLANs), the physical (PHY) layer rate may reach 600 Mbps. To achieve high efficiency at the medium access control (MAC) layer, we identify fundamental properties that must be satisfied by any CSMA-/CA-based MAC layers and develop a novel scheme called aggregation with fragment retransmission (AFR) that exhibits these properties. In the AFR scheme, multiple packets are aggregated into and transmitted in a single large frame. If errors happen during the transmission, only the corrupted fragments of the large frame are retransmitted. An analytic model is developed to evaluate the throughput and delay performance of AFR over noisy channels and to compare AFR with similar schemes in the literature. Optimal frame and fragment sizes are calculated using this model. Transmission delays are minimized by using a zero-waiting mechanism where frames are transmitted immediately once the MAC wins a transmission opportunity. We prove that zero-waiting can achieve maximum throughput. As a complement to the theoretical analysis, we investigate the impact of AFR on the performance of realistic application traffic with diverse requirements by simulations. We have implemented the AFR scheme in the NS-2 simulator and present detailed results for TCP, VoIP, and HDTV traffic. The AFR scheme described was developed as part of the IEEE 802.11n working group work. The analysis presented here is general enough to be extended to proposed schemes in the upcoming 802.11n standard. Trends indicated in this paper should extend to any well-designed aggregation schemes.

International audience; Software-Defined Networking (SDN) abstracts low- level network functionalities to simplify network management and reduce costs. The OpenFlow protocol implements the SDN concept by abstracting network communications as flows to be processed by network elements. In OpenFlow, the high-level policies are translated into network primitives called rules that are distributed over the network. While the abstraction offered by OpenFlow allows to potentially implement any policy, it raises the new question of how to define the rules and where to place them in the network while respecting all technical and administrative requirements. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive study of the so-called OpenFlow rules placement problem with a survey of the various proposals intending to solve it. Our study is multi-fold. First, we define the problem and its challenges. Second, we overview the large number of solutions proposed, with a clear distinction between solutions focusing on memory management and those proposing to reduce signaling traffic to ensure scalability. Finally, we discuss potential research directions around the OpenFlow rules placement problem.

This paper addresses the issue of the security of Internet Coordinate Systems,by proposing a general method for malicious behavior detection during coordinate computations. We first show that the dynamics of a node, in a coordinate system without abnormal or malicious behavior, can be modeled by a Linear State Space model and tracked by a Kalman filter. Then we show, that the obtained model can be generalized in the sense that the parameters of a filtercalibrated at a node can be used effectively to model and predict the dynamic behavior at another node, as long as the two nodes are not too far apart in the network. This leads to the proposal of a Surveyor infrastructure: Surveyor nodes are trusted, honest nodes that use each other exclusively to position themselves in the coordinate space, and are therefore immune to malicious behavior in the system.During their own coordinate embedding, other nodes can thenuse the filter parameters of a nearby Surveyor as a representation of normal, clean system behavior to detect and filter out abnormal or malicious activity. A combination of simulations and PlanetLab experiments are used to demonstrate the validity, generality, and effectiveness of the proposed approach for two representative coordinate embedding systems, namely Vivaldi and NPS.

Multicast video streaming over multirate wireless LANs imposes strong demands on video codecs and the underlying network. It is not sufficient that only the video codec or only the underlying protocols adapt to changes in the wireless link quality. Research efforts should be applied in both and in a synchronized way. Cross layer design is a new paradigm that addresses this challenge by optimizing communication network architectures across traditional layer boundaries. This paper presents cross-layer architecture for adaptive video multicast streaming over multirate wireless LANs where layer-specific information is passed in both directions, top-down and bottom-up. The authors jointly consider three layers of the protocol stack: the application, data link and physical layers. The authors analyze the performance of the proposed architecture and extensively evaluate it via simulations. The results show that the real-time video quality of the overall system can be greatly improved by cross-layer signaling.

International audience; Content-Centric Networks (CCNs) are fundamental evolutionary technologies that promise to form the cornerstone of the future Internet. The information flow in these networks is based on named data requesting, in-network caching, and forwarding -- which are unique and can be independent of IP routing. As a result, common IP-based network tools such as ping and traceroute can neither trace a forwarding path in CCNs nor feasibly evaluate CCN performance. We propose "contrace," a network tool for CCNs (particularly, CCNx implementation running on top of IP) that can be used to investigate 1) the Round-Trip Time (RTT) between content forwarder and consumer, 2) the states of in-network cache per name prefix, and 3) the forwarding path information per name prefix. We report a series of experiments conducted using contrace on a CCN topology created on a local testbed and the GEANT network topology emulated by the Mini-CCNx emulator. The results confirm that contrace is not only a useful tool for monitoring and operating a network, but also a helpful analysis tool for enhancing the design of CCNs. Further, contrace can report the number of received interests per cache or per chunk on the forwarding routers. This enables us to estimate the content popularity and design more effective cache control mechanisms in experimental networks.

Application Level Multicast is a promising approach to overcome the deployment problems of IP level multicast by establishing delivery trees using overlay links among end systems. This paper presents algorithms to support traffic engineering, to improve the reliability of multicast delivery, and to facilitate secure group communications. First, we introduce the so-called backup multicast tree algorithm to compute a set of n-1 backup multicast delivery trees from the default multicast tree. Each backup multicast tree has exactly one link of the default multicast tree that is replaced by a backup link from the set of available links. The algorithm can calculate this set of trees with a complexity of O(m log n), which is identical with the complexity of well known minimum spanning tree algorithms. The so-called reduced multicast tree algorithm is based on the backup multicast tree algorithm and can calculate a tree from the default multicast tree by removing a particular node and by replacing the links of the removed node. Using the algorithms trees can be calculated individually by each of the nodes but it requires global topology knowledge. We therefore discuss distributed versions of the algorithms.

The IEEE 802.11e medium access control (MAC) layer protocol is an emerging standard to support quality of service (QoS) in 802.11 wireless networks. Some recent work shows that the 802.11e hybrid coordination function (HCF) can improve significantly the QoS support in 802.11 networks. A simple HCF referenced scheduler has been proposed in the 802.11e which takes into account the QoS requirements of flows and allocates time to stations on the basis of the mean sending rate. As we show in this paper, this HCF referenced scheduling algorithm is only efficient and works well for flows with strict constant bit rate (CBR) characteristics. However, a lot of real-time applications, such as videoconferencing, have some variations in their packet sizes, sending rates or even have variable bit rate (VBR) characteristics. In this paper we propose FHCF, a simple and efficient scheduling algorithm for 802.11e that aims to be fair for both CBR and VBR flows. FHCF uses queue length estimations to tune its time allocation to mobile stations. We present analytical model evaluations and a set of simulations results, and provide performance comparisons with the 802.11e HCF referenced scheduler. Our performance study indicates that FHCF provides good fairness while supporting bandwidth and delay requirements for a large range of network loads.

Automatic rate adaptation in Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) wireless networks may cause drastic throughput degradation for high-speed bit rate stations (STAs). The CSMA/CA medium access method guarantees equal long-term channel access probability to all hosts when they are saturated. In previous work it has been shown that the saturation throughput of any STA is limited by the saturation throughput of the STA with the lowest bit rate in the same infrastructure. In order to overcome this problem, we first introduce in this article a new model for finite load sources with multirate capabilities. We use our model to investigate the throughput degradation outside and inside the saturation regime. We define a new fairness index based on the channel occupation time to have more suitable definition of fairness in multirate environments. Further, we propose two simple but powerful mechanisms to partly bypass the observed decline in performance and meet the proposed fairness. Finally we use our model for finite load sources to evaluate our proposed mechanisms in terms of total throughput and Medium Access Control layer delay for various network configurations.

*Summary Quality of service (QoS) is a key problem of today’s IP networks. Many frameworks (IntServ, DiffServ, MPLS, etc.) have been proposed to provide service differentiation in the Internet. At the same time, the Internet is becoming more and more heterogeneous due to the recent explosion of wireless networks. In wireless environments, bandwidth is scarce and channel conditions are time-varying and sometimes highly lossy. Many previous research works show that what works well in a wired network cannot be directly applied in the wireless environment. Although IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN (WLAN) is the most widely used WLAN standard today, it cannot provide QoS support for the increasing number of multimedia applications. Thus, a large number of 802.11 QoS enhancement schemes have been proposed, each one focusing on a particular mode. This paper summarizes all these schemes and presents a survey of current research activities. First, we analyze the QoS limitations of IEEE 802.11 wireless MAC layers. Then, different QoS enhancement techniques proposed for 802.11 WLAN are described and classified along with their advantages/drawbacks. Finally, the upcoming IEEE 802.11e QoS enhancement standard is introduced and studied in detail.

This paper describes and analyzes SCORE, a scalable multicast-based communication protocol for large-scale virtual environments (LSVE) on the Internet. Today, many of these applications have to handle an increasing number of participants and deal with the difficult problem of scalability. We propose an approach at the transport layer, using multiple multicast groups and multiple agents. This approach involves the dynamic partitioning of the virtual environment into spatial areas and the association of these areas with multicast groups. It uses a method based on the theory of planar point processes to determine an appropriate cell size, so that the incoming traffic at the receiver side remains with a given probability below a sufficiently low threshold. We evaluate the performance of our scheme and show that it allows to significantly improve the participants' satisfaction while adding very low overhead.

International audience; The Software-Defined Networking approach permits to realize new policies. In OpenFlow in particular, a controller decides on behalf of the switches which forwarding rules must be installed and where. However with this flexibility comes the challenge of the computation of a rule allocation matrix meeting both high-level policies and the network constraints such as memory or link capacity limitations. Nevertheless, in many situations (e.g., data-center networks), the exact path followed by packets has not significant impact on performances as long as packets are delivered to their final destination decided by the endpoint policy. It is thus possible to deviate part of the traffic to alternative paths so to better use network resources without violating the endpoint policy. In this paper, we propose a linear optimization model of the rule allocation problem in resource constrained OpenFlow networks with loose routing policies. We show that the general problem is NP-hard and propose a polynomial time heuristic, called OFFICER, that aims to maximize the amount of carried traffic in under-provisioned networks. Our numerical evaluation on four different topologies show that exploiting various paths allows to increase the amount of traffic supported by the network without significantly increasing the path length.

short paper (4 pages); International audience; Motivated by the internets of the future, which will likely be considerably larger in size as well as highly heterogeneous and decentralized, we propose Decentralize-SDN, D-SDN, a framework that enables not only physical- but also logical distribution of the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) control plane. D-SDN accomplishes network control distribution by defining a hierarchy of controllers that can "match" an internet's organizational- and administrative structure. By delegating control between main controllers and secondary controllers, D-SDN is able to accommodate administrative decentralization and autonomy. It incorporates security as an integral part of the framework. This paper describes D-SDN and presents two use cases, namely network capacity sharing and public safety network services.

[camera ready version]; International audience; The idea behind Software Defined Networking (SDN) is to conceive the network as one programmable entity rather than a set of devices to manually configure, and OpenFlow meets this objective. In OpenFlow, a centralized programmable controller installs rules onto switches to implement policies. However, this flexibility comes at the expense of extra overhead as the number of rules might exceed the memory capacity of switches, which raises the question of how to place most profitable rules on board. Solutions proposed so far strictly impose paths to be followed inside the network. We advocate instead that we can trade routing requirements within the network to concentrate on where to forward traffic, not how to do it. As an illustration of the concept, we propose an optimization problem that gets the maximum amount of traffic delivered according to policies and the actual dimensioning of the network. The traffic that cannot be accommodated is forwarded to the controller that has the capacity to process it further. We also demonstrate that our approach permits a better utilization of scarce resources in the network.

The single class best effort service available in the current Internet does not provide the guarantees, typically expressed in terms of minimum bandwidth and/or maximum delay or loss, associated with real-time applications such as live video. One way to support such applications in best effort networks is to use control mechanisms that adapt the coding, transmission, reception, and decoding processes at the source and at the destination(s) depending on the state of the network. In this paper, we examine and report on our experience over the past several years with such mechanisms for videoconferencing software. We illustrate our points with results obtained with the IVS software developed at INRIA.We consider in particular rate and error control mechanisms. These mechanisms adapt the bandwidth requirements and the resilience to packet loss of the video stream sent by a source coder. We have found that they do prevent video sources from swamping the resources of the Internet, and that they provide reasonably graceful degradation of image quality during periods of network congestion. However, they raise thorny issues of fairness with non-real time traffic sources (such as TCP sources) and of scalability for the multicast delivery of video in heterogeneous networks. We examine different approaches to tackling these problems.

accepted in IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials; International audience; The idea of programmable networks has recently re-gained considerable momentum due to the emergence of the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm. SDN, often referred to as a ''radical new idea in networking'', promises to dramatically simplify network management and enable innovation through network programmability. This paper surveys the state-of-the-art in programmable networks with an emphasis on SDN. We provide a historic perspective of programmable networks from early ideas to recent developments. Then we present the SDN architecture and the OpenFlow standard in particular, discuss current alternatives for implementation and testing of SDN-based protocols and services, examine current and future SDN applications, and explore promising research directions based on the SDN paradigm.

In this paper, we discuss User Centric Networks (UCNs) as a way of, if not completely solving, considerably mitigating the problem of sharing limited network capacity and resources efficiently and fairly. UCNs are self-organizing networks where the end-user plays an active role in delivering networking functions such as providing Internet access to other users. We propose to leverage the recently proposed Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm to enable cooperation between wireless nodes and provide capacity sharing services in UCNs. Our SDN-based approach allows to extend coverage of existing network infrastructure (such as WiFi or 3GPP) to other end-users or ad hoc networks that would otherwise not be able to have access to network connectivity and services. Moreover, the proposed SDN-based architecture also takes into account current network load and conditions, and quality-of service (QoS) requirements. Another important feature of our framework is that security is an integral part of the architecture and protocols. We discuss the requirements for enabling capacity sharing services in the context of UCNs (e.g., resource discovery, node admission control, cooperation incentives, QoS, security, etc) and how SDN can aid in enabling such services. The paper also describes the proposed SDN-enabled capacity sharing framework for UCNs.

International audience; Emerging challenged networks require new protocols and strategies to cope with a high degree of mobility, high de- lays and unknown, possibly non-existing routes within the network. Researchers have proposed di erent store-carry- and-forward protocols for data delivery in challenged net- works. These have been complemented with appropriate drop and scheduling policies that deal with the limitations of the nodes' bu ers and the limited duration of opportunis- tic encounters in these networks. Nevertheless, the vast majority of these protocols and strategies are designed for end-to-end transmissions. Yet, a paradigm shift from the traditional way of addressing the endpoints in the network has been occurring towards content-centric networking. To this end, we present CEDO, a content-centric dissemination algorithm for challenged networks. CEDO aims at maximiz- ing the total delivery-rate of distributed content in a setting where a range of contents of di erent popularity may be requested and stored, but nodes have limited resources. It achieves this by maintaining a delivery-rate utility per con- tent that is proportional to the content miss rate and that is used by the nodes to make appropriate drop and scheduling decisions. This delivery-rate utility can be estimated locally by each node using unbiased estimators fed by sampled infor- mation on the mobile network obtained by gossiping. Both simulations and theory suggest that CEDO achieves its set goal, and outperforms a baseline LRU-based policy by 72%, even in relatively small scenarios. The framework followed by CEDO is general enough to be applied to other global performance objectives as well.

International audience; This paper proposes a novel approach to capacity sharing in hybrid networked environments, i.e., environments that consist of infrastructure-based as well as infrastructure-less networks. The proposed framework is based on Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and provides flexible, efficient, and secure capacity sharing solutions in a variety of hybrid network scenarios. In this paper, we describe the challenges raised by capacity sharing in hybrid networks, describe our framework in detail and how it addresses these challenges, and discuss implementation issues. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first SDN-based capacity sharing solution that targets hybrid networks and that incorporates security as an integral part of the proposed approach.

International audience; Content dissemination is the primary usage of the Internet today, whereas the existing Internet architecture based on TCP/IP is mainly designed for point-to-point communications. Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has been proposed to conciliate Internet usage and technology. The idea behind ICN is to omit the notion of host and location and establish content as the first class citizen of the network. ICN advocates in-network caching, i.e., to cache content on the path from content providers to requesters. This on-path caching achieves good overall performance but is not optimal as content may be replicated on routers so reducing the total volume of content that can be cached. To overcome this limitation, we introduce the notion of off-path caching where we allocate content to well defined off-path caches within the network and deflect the traffic off the optimal path toward these caches that are spread across the network. Off-path caching improves the global hit ratio by efficiently utilizing the network-wide available caching capacity and permits to reduce egress links' bandwidth usage.

International audience; Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is designed for efficient content dissemination and supports caching contents on the path from content providers to content consumers to improve user experience and reduce costs. However, this strategy is not optimal inside a domain. In this paper, we propose a solution to improve caching in CCN using a Software-Defined Networking approach.

This paper describes the INRIA videoconferencing system (IVS), a low bandwidth tool for real-time video between workstations on the Internet using UDP datagrams and the IP multicast extension. The video coder-decoder (codec) is a software implementation of the ITU-T recommendation H.261 originally developed for the integrated services digital network (ISDN). Our focus is on adapting this codec for the Internet environment. We propose a packetization scheme, an error control scheme and an output rate control scheme that adapts the image coding process based on network conditions. This work shows that it is possible to maintain videoconferences with reasonable quality across packet-switched networks without requiring special support from the network such as resource reservation or admission control.

International audience; In this paper, motivated by the vision that future internets will comprise infrastructure-based and infrastructure-less networks, we explore the use of the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm in these so-called "heterogeneous" networked environments. To make the case for SDN in heterogeneous networks, or Heterogeneous SDN (H-SDN), we examine application scenarios in which H-SDN is a key enabling technology. We also identify the additional features and requirements imposed by the H-SDN paradigm and discuss the research challenges they raised.

Traditionally, wireless protocol proposals have been often tested and validated using only analytical and simulation models. However, as the wireless environment is very complex to model accurately, and since the cost of wireless cards has decreased in an exponential way, today more and more research papers include evaluation of new proposals using experimentation on real devices. Indeed, experimentation is a mandatory step before possible deployment of new network protocols with real users. However, wireless experimentation is much more complex to set up and run than simulation, and it is important to avoid many pitfalls that can occur during experimentation. The objectives of this paper are twofold. First, we describe typical problems currently encountered in wireless-based experimentation, and we present simple guidelines to avoid them. Second, we propose an experimental methodology where the detection of anomalies, calibration of the measurement setup, and clear definition of the scenario (among others) make easier the repeatability of results. Finally, we showcase an implementation of the proposed methodology with an experimentation scenario whose objective is to analyze the stability of the wireless channel.

We present the extensions made to NEPI, the Network Experimentation Programming Interface, to allow easy creation and customization of routing overlays on top of PlanetLab. We particularly focus on demonstrating the traffic shaping capabilities provided by NEPI, with the use of customizable stream filters on PlanetLab overlays to induce controllable packet prioritization.

Ubiquity of portable computing devices coupled with wide availability of wireless communication present new impor- tant opportunities for applications involving media-rich content dissemination. However, as access networks become increasingly more heterogeneous, seamless data delivery across internets consisting of a variety of network technology becomes a real challenge. In this demonstration, we showcase a system that enables content dissemination over heterogeneous internets consisting of wired, infrastructure-based and infrastructure-less wireless networks that may be prone to intermittent connectivity. Using an efficient, yet flexible buffer management scheme, we are able to address application-specific performance requirements such as average delay, delivery probability, energy efficiency, etc. Our system uses the Message Delivery in Heterogeneous, Disruption-prone Networks (MeDeHa) [2]) framework to deliver messages across a heterogeneous internet coupled with History-Based Scheduling and Drop (HBSD) buffer management [1] as a way to optimize resources provided by opportunistic networks. MeDeHa, which is described in detail in [2], provides seamless data delivery over interconnecting networks of different types, i.e., infrastructure-based and infrastructure-less networks. MeDeHa's comprehensive approach to bridging infrastructure-based and infrastructureless networks also copes with intermittent connectivity. For this demonstration, we showcase a "complete stack" solution featuring, from to top to bottom, the DTN2 "bundle" layer, HBSD as an "external router" to DTN2, and MeDeHa, which handles message delivery. We have implemented, on a Linux-based testbed, (i) the MeDeHa framework, (ii) the HBSD [3] external router for the DTN2 [4] architecture.

Delivery of multimedia digital content through wireless networks poses non-trivial performance issues because of scarcity and volatility of the wireless medium. The goal of this study is to analyze the impact of multipath fading and interference on multicast video streaming in an indoor LOS (Line of Sight) wireless environment using off-the-shelf fixed WiFi equipment. Multipath fading experienced by the receivers is represented by empirically estimating ricean K-factor from packet traces captured at the receivers. Degradation in the video quality incurred during transmission is quantified by measuring video quality metric (VQM). To quantify the impact of channel interference, controlled traffic is generated on a channel adjacent to the selected channel. We use human movements to alter the depth of signal fading at the receivers. Our experiments show that packet loss increased two times in the face of multipath fading and almost three times in the face of channel interference. The measurements presented in this paper can help users to monitor and maintain the quality of their wireless networks and optimize the use of limited network resources.

In this paper, we present a naming scheme for heterogeneous networks composed of infrastructure-based and infrastructure-less networks where nodes may be subject to intermittent connectivity. The proposed scheme aims at decoupling object identification from location and is designed to operate with status-quo Internet routing. We showcase the proposed naming scheme implemented on the NS-3 network simulator and demonstrate that nodes are able to receive messages in both infrastructure-based and infrastructure-less networks despite frequent disconnections and changing location identifiers (i.e., IP address), while visiting different networks.

There is no doubt that networks are becoming increasingly heterogeneous and future internetworks will likely interconnect different types of networks including wired, infrastructure-based wireless as well as infrastructure-less wireless networks, a.k.a., multi-hop mobile ad-hoc networks (or MANETs). Integrating MANETs to infrastructure-based networks (wired or wireless) allows network coverage to be extended to regions where infrastructure deployment is sparse or nonexistent as well as a way to cope with intermittent connectivity. However, to date there are no comprehensive solutions that integrate MANETs to infrastructure-based networks. In this paper, we introduce a message delivery framework, MeDeHa++ that is able to bridge together infrastructure-based and infrastructure-less networks. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate the benefits of MeDeHa++, especially in terms of the extended coverage it provides as well as its ability to cope with arbitrarily long-lived connectivity disruptions. Another important contribution of this work is to deploy and evaluate our message delivery framework on a real network testbed as well as conduct experiments in “hybrid” scenarios running partly on simulation and partly on real nodes.

IEEE 802.16 WiMAX is a promising new wireless technology for providing broadband ubiquitous network access. As more and more researchers and industrials are interested in simulating such networks, a number of WiMAX simulators have been emerged in the networking community. One of the most recent WiMAX simulator is the one developed for ns-3. This module provides a standard compliant and well designed implementation of the standard and benefits from the major enhancements provided by ns-3 (compared to other network simulators) which has all the capabilities of becoming the leading network simulator in near future. However, this WiMAX module still lacks some important features which motivated this work. In this paper, we first provide a snapshot of existing WiMAX simulators available in the public domain, while highlighting their limitations. Then, we describe the new features and enhancements we have integrated within the ns-3 WiMAX module, and in particular: a realistic and scalable physical model, an IP packet classifier for the convergence sub-layer, efficient uplink and downlink schedulers, support for multicast traffic and pcap packet tracing functionality. The new design of the physical layer has improved the simulation time by several magnitude orders while still providing a realistic implementation of the standard. Furthermore, the IP classifier has enabled the simulation of an unlimited number of service flows per subscriber station, while the proposed schedulers improve the management of the QoS requirements for the different service flows.

This demo illustrates the benefits of BitHoc, a standalone protocol for content sharing among spontaneous communities of mobile handhelds using wireless multi-hop connections. BitHoc is a Trackerless BitTorrent-like application adapted to mobile wireless ad-hoc networks(MANET). The current BitHoc architecture is composed of three principal components: a content sharing service, a membership management service and a content discovery service. The present demo highlights the efficiency of the BitHoc package in dealing with diverse challenges encountered in theMANET environment. Our solution considers the following issues: routing overhead, sharing opportunities and mobility of nodes. In order to validate the feasibility of our application and evaluate its performance, we consider a test-bed composed of PDAs and smartphones equipped withWIFI adapters and Windows Mobile 6 operating system.

As a result of the wide spread of new efficient mobile communication devices, users are more and more willing to find on these devices (PDAs, Smartphones, etc) applications similar to the ones they are using on their desktop computers. We go one step in this direction and propose in this demo a software we have designed and implemented to enable content sharing among spontaneous communities of mobile users using wireless multihop connections. Our contribution consists in designing, implementing and testing a trackerless BitTorrent like application adapted to wireless ad-hoc networks. The proposed architecture includes two principal components: a membership management service and a content sharing service. As classical tracker-based BitTorrent membership management and peer discovery are unfeasible in ad hoc networks, we design the membership management service as a distributed tracker overlay that connects peers involved in the same sharing session. Using the membership information provided by the tracker overlay, the content sharing service schedules the data transfer connections among the session members by leveraging the multihop routing feature of wireless ad-hoc networks. Our test-bed composed of PDAs and smartphones equipped with WIFI adapters and Windows Mobile 6 operating system is used to validate the feasibility of our application and to evaluate its performance.

International audience; In this paper, we present an efficient message delivery mechanism that enables distribution/dissemination of messages in an internet connecting heterogeneous networks and prone to disruptions in connectivity. We call our protocol MeDeHa (pronounced “medea”) for Message Delivery in Heterogeneous, Disruptionprone Networks. MeDeHa is complementary to the IRTF's Bundle Architecture: while the Bundle Architecture provides storage above the transport layer in order to enable interoperability among networks that support different types of transport layers, MeDeHa stores data at the link layer addressing heterogeneity at lower layers (e.g., when intermediate nodes do not support higher-layer protocols). MeDeHa also takes advantage of network heterogeneity (e.g., nodes supporting more than one network) to improve message delivery. For example, in the case of IEEE 802.11 networks, participating nodes may use both infrastructure- and ad hoc modes to deliver data to otherwise unavailable destinations. Another important feature of MeDeHa is that there is no need to deploy special-purpose nodes such as message ferries, data mules, or throwboxes in order to relay data to intended destinations, or to connect to the backbone network wherever infrastructure is available. The network is able to store data destined to temporarily unavailable nodes for some time depending upon existing storage as well as quality-of-service issues such as delivery delay bounds imposed by the application. We evaluate MeDeHa via simulations using indoor scenarios (e.g. convention centers, exposition halls, museums etc.) and show significant improvement in delivery ratio in the face of episodic connectivity. We also showcase MeDeHa's support for different levels of quality-of-service through traffic differentiation and message prioritization.

BitTorrent is one of the Internet's most efficient content distribution protocols. It is known to perform very well over the wired Internet where end-to-end performance is almost guaranteed. However, in wireless ad hoc networks, many constraints appear as the scarcity of resources and their shared nature, which make running BitTorrent with its default configuration not lead to best performances. To these constraints it adds the fact that peers are both routers and end-users and that TCP-performance drops seriously with the number of hops. We show in this work that the neighbor selection mechanism in BitTorrent plays an important role in determining the performance of the protocol when deployed over a wireless ad hoc network. It is no longer efficient to choose and treat with peers independently of their location. A first solution is to limit the scope of the neighborhood. In this case, TCP connections are fast but there is no more diversity of pieces in the network: pieces propagate in a unique direction from the seed to distant peers. This prohibits peers from reciprocating data and leads to low sharing ratios and suboptimal utilization of network resources. To recover from these impairments, we propose an enhancement to BitTorrent which aims to minimize the time to download the content and at the same time to enforce cooperation among peers. Our solution considers a restricted neighborhood to reduce routing overhead and to improve throughput, while establishing few connections to remote peers to improve diversity of pieces. With the help of extensive NS-2 simulations, we show that these enhancements to BitTorrent significantly improve the file completion time while fully profiting from the incentives implemented in BitTorrent to enforce fair sharing.

Internet coordinate systems (e.g. [1,?]) have been proposed to allow for distance (Round-Trip Time, shortly RTT) estimation between nodes, in order to reduce the measurement overhead of many applications and overlay networks. Indeed, by embedding the Internet delay space into a metric space --- an operation that only requires each node in the system to measure delays to a small set of other nodes (its neighbors), nodes are attributed coordinates that can then be used to estimate the RTT between any two nodes, without further measurements, simply by applying the distance function associated with the chosen metric space to the nodes' coordinates. Recently, these coordinates-based systems have been shown to be accurate, with very low distance prediction error. However, most, if not all, of current proposals for coordinate systems assume that the nodes partaking in the system cooperate fully and honestly with each other --- that is that the information reported by probed nodes is correct --- this could also make them quite vulnerable to malicious attacks. In particular, insider attacks executed by (potentially colluding) legitimate users or nodes infiltrating the system could prove very effective. As the use of overlays and applications relying on coordinates increases, one could imagine the release of worms and other malware, exploiting such cooperation, which could seriously disrupt the operations of these systems and therefore the virtual networks and applications relying on them for distance measurements. In this talk, we first identify such attacks, and through a simulation study, we observed their impact on two recently proposed positioning systems [3], namely Vivaldi and NPS. We experimented with attack strategies, carried out by malicious nodes that provide biased coordinates information and delay measurement probes, and that aim to (i) introduce disorder in the system, (ii) fool honest nodes to move far away from their correct positions and (iii) isolate particular target nodes in the system through collusion. Our findings confirm the susceptibility of the coordinate systems to such attacks. Our major contribution is therefore a model for malicious behavior detection during coordinates embedding [4]. We first show that the dynamics of a node, in a coordinate system without abnormal or malicious behavior, can be modeled by a Linear State Space model and tracked by a Kalman filter. Then we show, that the obtained model can be generalized in the sense that the parameters of a filter calibrated at a node can be used effectively to model and predict the dynamic behavior at another node, as long as the two nodes are not too far apart in the network. This leads to the proposal of a Surveyor infrastructure: Surveyor nodes are trusted, honest nodes that use each other exclusively to position themselves in the coordinate space, and are therefore immune to malicious behavior in the system. During their own coordinate embedding, other nodes can then use the filter parameters of a nearby Surveyor as a representation of normal, clean system behavior to detect and filter out abnormal or malicious activity. A combination of simulations and PlanetLab experiments are used to demonstrate the validity, generality, and effectiveness of the proposed approach for both Vivaldi and NPS. Finally, we address the issue of asserting the accuracy of Internet coordinates advertised by nodes of Internet coordinate systems during distance estimations. Indeed, some nodes may even lie deliberately about their coordinates to mount various attacks against applications and overlays. Our proposed method consists in two steps: 1) establish the correctness of a node's claimed coordinate by using the Surveyor infrastructure and malicious embedding neighbor detection; and 2) issue a time limited validity certificate for each verified coordinate. Validity periods are computed based on an analysis of coordinate inter-shift times observed by Surveyors. By doing this, each surveyor can estimate the time until the next shift and thus, can limit the validity of the certificate it issues to regular nodes for their calculated coordinates. Our method is illustrated using a trace collected from a Vivaldi system deployed on PlanetLab, where inter-shift times are shown to follow long-tail distribution (log-normal distribution in most cases, or Weibull distribution otherwise). We show the effectiveness of our method by measuring the impact of a variety of attacks, experimented on PlanetLab, on distance estimates.