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Self-driving networks represent the next step of network management techniques in the close future. A fundamental point for such an evolution is the use of Machine Learning based solutions to extract information from data coming from network devices during their activity. In this work we focus on a new type of data, available thanks to the definition of the novel SRv6 paradigm, referred to as SRv6 Traffic Counters ( SRTCs ). SRTCs provide aggregated measurements related to forwarding operations performed by SRv6 routers. In this work a detailed description of different SRTCs types (SR.INT, PISD, PSID.TM and POL) is provided and their relationships is formalized. The theoretical framework deployed is used to identify, on the basis of network configuration parameters of both SRv6 and IGP protocols, the minimum set of independent SRTCs to characterize the Network Status : we show that about the 80% of counters can be neglected with no information loss. We also apply our framework to two use cases: i) Traffic Matrix (TM) Assessment and ii) Traffic Anomaly Detection. For the TM assessment, we show that in a partially deployed SRv6 scenario a specific type of SRTCs , i.e., PSID, is more reliable than other ones; on the contrary, in a fully deployed scenario POL and PSID.TM counters provide the full TM knowledge. For the Traffic Anomaly Detection case, we show that known solutions based on link load measurements can be improved when integrating SRTCs information.

This paper proposes a scheme to reduce a size of a packet header for a segment routing (SR) scheme in a software-defined network (SDN). The SR scheme inserts a segment identification (SID) list into the packet header to indicate a path for the source–destination pair of the packet. The path can be split into different segments to suit the service requirement and the segments are carried by the SID-list whose length increases with the number of segments. This also increases the packet overhead, and an additional packet is needed if the packet length exceeds the maximum transmission unit (MTU). Moreover, it may not be possible to implement SR in SDN due to the limited number of stacked labels provided by the switch vendor. In the proposed scheme, the SID-list is replaced by a single tag to indicate a node edge, called a swapping node. The tag is replaced by a new tag at the swapping node. With this scheme, the size of SID-list is fixed and does not vary with the number of segments, and no additional packets are required. A mathematic model to balance the number of flow entries in each swapping node is introduced by minimizing the maximum number of flow entries in each swapping node over the network. We implement the proposed scheme on the transmission-Japan science information network (SINET5) and demonstrate confirms its functionality.

It is still a challenging task to provide satisfactory quality of experience (QoE) to users by traditional routing mechanism in current public Internet for real-time multimedia services with high bandwidth and strict end-to-end latency constraint. Multipath transmission is a promising way to improve the performance of data delivery, due to its advantage in bandwidth aggregation capacity over multiple paths to speed up high volume transfers between endpoints. However, existing multipath transmission has many disadvantages such as the requirements for end-host support (i.e. the necessary multi-homed network setting, and operating system or upper applications updates of user devices), and blindingly pursuing maximum of transmission throughput. Path allocation and end-to-end transmission control are two important factors affecting the quality of multipath transmission. As an emerging network architecture, software-defined networking (SDN) is flexible, manageable, and responsive to rapid changes in traffic requirements. In this paper, we propose a multipath transport scheme based on SDN with segment routing (SR) which can meet the bandwidth and low end-to-end transmission latency requirements of real-time interactive multimedia services. The centralized SDN controller is extended to allocate multiple disjoint paths meeting bandwidth requirement meanwhile balancing the network load. The proprietary multipath media server (MMS) dynamically controls the assignment between subflows and routing paths to reduce the end-to-end transmission latency and thus improve QoE of end-users. To show the feasibility of our approach, we construct an SDN platform using Mininet. Simulation results show that our approach performs better compared to the conventional approaches in terms of traffic balancing and end-to-end transmission delay.

Kualitas koneksi khususnya pada backbone menjadi tantangan Internet Service Provider (ISP). MPLS berkerja di layer 2,5 OSI yang mampu mempercepat pengiriman paket pada jaringan backbone. MPLS melekatkan label pada paket yang dikirimkan. Salah satu layanan dari MPLS adalah traffic engineering yang dibuat dengan protokol RSVP. Terdapat protokol baru untuk memberi label pada paket dan mendukung traffic engineering, yaitu Segment Routing. Penelitian ini menganalisis perbandingan performa traffic engineering dengan RSVP dan Segment Routing. Baik pada penerapan RSVP maupun Segment Routing dibuat tunnel untuk jalur utama dan reroute menuju jalur cadangan. Penelitian dilakukan pada emulator EVE-NG dengan mengambil studi kasus topologi backbone di PT ICON+.Hasil penelitian adalah Segment Routing di MPLS menyederhanakan kinerja dari router dalam hal pelabelan dan dalam memelihara Label Switch Path (LSP), tidak membutuhkan protokol signaling. Hasil pengujian latency pada jalur utama, dengan Segment Routing maupun dengan RSVP mempunyai nilai sama. Sedangkan pada jalur cadangan, nilai latency dari Segment Routing lebih kecil, sehingga Segment Routing dapat mengirim data dengan lebih cepat daripada dengan RSVP. Hasil pengujian packet delivery ratio dan packet loss ratio dengan Segment Routing dan dengan RSVP baik di jalur utama maupun jalur cadangan bernilai sama, yaitu 100% dan 0%. Baik pada jalur utama maupun jalur cadangan, penerapan Segment Routing mempunyai nilai throughput yang lebih besar daripada penerapan RSVP, sehingga Segment Routing dapat mengirim data dengan lebih cepat daripada RSVP. Pada kondisi link mengalami kegagalan saat pengujian, keduanya memiliki 1% packet loss, namun perpindahan jalur dilakukan dengan lebih cepat pada Segment Routing.

Service Function Chaining (SFC) is an emerging paradigm aiming to provide flexible service deployment, lifecycle management, and scaling in a micro-service architecture. SFC is defined as a logically connected list of ordered Service Functions (SFs) that require high availability to maintain user experience. The SFC protection mechanism is one way to ensure high availability, and it is achieved by proactively deploying backup SFs and installing backup paths in the network. Recent studies focused on ensuring the availability of backup SFs, but overlooked SFC unavailability due to network failures. This paper extends our previous work to propose a Hybrid Protection mechanism for SFC (HP-SFC) that divides SFC into segments and combines the merits of local and global failure recovery approaches to define an installation policy for backup paths. A novel labeling technique labels SFs instead of SFC, and they are stacked as per the order of SFs in a particular SFC before being inserted into a packet header for traffic steering through segment routing. The emulation results showed that HP-SFC recovered SFC from failure within 20–25 ms depending on the topology and reduced backup paths’ flow entries by at least 8.9% and 64.5% at most. Moreover, the results confirmed that the segmentation approach made HP-SFC less susceptible to changes in network topology than other protection schemes.

IPv6 Segment Routing (SRv6) is a recent implementation of the source routing paradigm in IPv6 network. A programmability framework has recently been added to SRv6 and enables it to support diverse use-cases. We leverage this support to design, implement, and assess a Forward Erasure Correction (FEC) technique that transparently protects IPv6 packets. We implement our encoders and decoders using eBPF on the Linux kernel and evaluate the benefits that they bring with IoT devices.

The Segment Routing (SR) architecture is based on loose source routing. A list of instructions, called segments can be added to the packet headers, to influence the forwarding and the processing of the packets in an SR enabled network. In SRv6 (Segment Routing over IPv6 data plane) the segments are represented with IPv6 addresses, which are 16 bytes long. There are some SRv6 service scenarios that may require to carry a large number of segments in the IPv6 packet headers. This can be inefficient due to the overheads of the segment list, or can even cause processing issues in the crossed nodes due to the very large header to be processed. In this paper we present the Micro SID solution for the efficient representation of segment identifiers. With this solution, the length of the segment list can be drastically reduced., Comment: Extended version (v1) of submitted paper - October 2020

Applications such as virtual reality and online gaming require low delays for acceptable user experience. A key task for over-the-top (OTT) service providers who provide these applications is sending traffic through the networks to minimize delays. OTT traffic is typically generated from multiple data centers which are multi-homed to several network ingresses. However, information about the path characteristics of the underlying network from the ingresses to destinations is not explicitly available to OTT services. These can only be inferred from external probing. In this paper, we combine network tomography with machine learning to minimize delays. We consider this problem in a general setting where traffic sources can choose a set of ingresses through which their traffic enter a black box network. The problem in this setting can be viewed as a reinforcement learning problem with constraints on a continuous action space, which to the best of our knowledge have not been investigated by the machine learning community. Key technical challenges to solving this problem include the high dimensionality of the problem and handling constraints that are intrinsic to networks. Evaluation results show that our methods achieve up to 60% delay reductions in comparison to standard heuristics. Moreover, the methods we develop can be used in a centralized manner or in a distributed manner by multiple independent agents., 12 pages, 15 figures, submited to JSAC

To tackle the network congestion problem caused by ground gateway stations arranged within a limited area in low earth orbit (LEO) satellite networks, a routing algorithm based on segment routing for traffic return is proposed. Light and heavy load zones are dynamically divided according to the relative position relationship between gateways and the reverse slot. The pre-balancing shortest path algorithm is used in the light load zone, and the minimum weight path defined by congestion index is the routing rule in the heavy load zone. Then, the consistent forwarding is performed referring to segment routing in all zones. Simulation conditions are different sizes of heavy load zone, different traffic density distributions, and different traffic demands. Simulation results confirm that the load-balancing performance is improved significantly with the extension of the heavy load zone size in terms of the average rejection ratio, the average relative throughput, the maximum link utilization, and the average delay. The proposed algorithm is an alternative solution and guidance for routing strategy in LEO satellite networks.

Segment routing (SR) is a new network paradigm to optimize network performance. Through leveraging source routing, SR is able to achieve more fine-grained control of data flow in the SR domain. However, it is difficult to introduce large-scale full SR network into existing traditional network due to the economic constraints and immature operation technology. Thus, incrementally deploying SR nodes into an existing network is preferred, which forms the hybrid IP/SR scenario. In the hybrid network, with SR enabled devices, the routing path of flow can be dynamically adjusted. Network utility is an important factor to reflect the user's satisfaction with the allocated bandwidth. In this paper, we propose a bandwidth allocation algorithm to maximize network utility in hybrid IP/SR network and thus improve customer's satisfaction. The simulation results show that the bandwidth allocation algorithm proposed is able to improve the utility of network significantly, and the utility of network will increase with the number of SR nodes deployed in the network.

The unprecedented growth of network traffic has brought excessive challenges to network operators. To prevent network congestion, network operators conduct traffic engineering (TE) for their routing optimization. In recent years, segment routing traffic engineering (SRTE) has emerged as one of the promising approaches for its high scalability and low control overheads. However, conventional SRTE approaches in large-scale networks are computationally prohibitive, which may lead to delayed system operations and unsatisfactory service qualities. In this paper, we formulate a bi-objective mixed-integer nonlinear program (BOMINLP) to investigate the trade-off between link utilization and computation time in SRTE. Due to the difficulty in solving the original problem directly, we decompose it into two sequential sub-problems. The first sub-problem is to minimize computation time through node selection, and the second one is to minimize maximum link utilization via flow assignment. To this end, we first employ randomized sampling based on stretch bounding to obtain a reduced solution space and then solve a linear program (LP) using existing software tools for the sub-problems. To evaluate our proposed solution, we employ network topologies and traffic matrices from publicly available datasets. Our simulation results show that our proposed solution can effectively reduce computation time while retaining comparable maximum link utilization as compared with several comparison approaches.

With the ubiquitous use of networking technologies in the military domain, network-centric warfare, which aims at improving the system of systems (SoS) capability, is a no-way-back trend of military development. Recently, it has become increasingly important to construct an airborne backbone network (ABN) to maintain coverage and provide reach-back to military units because the terrestrial networks cannot be flexibly deployed and have poor survivability. Given the advantages of software-defined networking (SDN), a software-defined airborne backbone network architecture (SD-ABN) is proposed for the ABN to ensure network flexibility, openness, interoperability, and evolvability. To meet the challenges of traffic management in SD-ABN, segment routing (SR) is applied with some practical modifications for the SD-ABN. Moreover, a network traffic scheduling algorithm termed MRP-TS is designed based on SD-ABN to improve the transmission reliability and bandwidth utilization by balancing network traffic to multiple reliable transmission paths. Relevant theories have been proposed and proved to illustrate the correctness of the algorithm. The network simulation experiments have been conducted using the network simulator EXata 5.1, and the simulation results validate the effectiveness of our proposals.

Traffic matrix (TM) assessment is a key issue for optimizing network management costs and quality of service. This paper presents a method to measure the intensity of ingress–egress traffic flows on an Internet service providers network that overcomes the limits of the classical measurement-based approaches. The proposed algorithm, called segment routing perturbation traffic (SERPENT), uses a routing perturbation approach enabled by the segment routing paradigm: The paths of a subset of flows are changed so that their intensities can be determined measuring the variation of the load of the network links. The TM is measured in successive steps, called snapshots, in which sets of flows are progressively re-routed and measured, under a maximum link utilization constraint. We state an integer linear programming (ILP) optimization problem to determine the flows to be rerouted in one snapshot. SERPENT is an heuristic offering an efficient solution to the stated ILP. Results show that SERPENT assesses the intensity of more than 80% of flows even when the network is highly stressed, while reducing the configuration cost with respect to classical approaches. Moreover, when used in conjunction with an estimation algorithm, SERPENT allows a reduction of the estimation error by more than 50% with fewer than 5 snapshots.

Segment routing is an emerging routing technology that was initially driven by commercial vendors to achieve scalable, flexible, and controllable routing. In segment routing, multiple multi-protocol label switch labels are stacked in the packet header to complete end-to-end transmission, which may lead to a large label stack and a long packet header. Thus, scalability issues may occur when segment routing is applied to large-scale networks. To address this issue, multiple mechanisms and algorithms have been proposed for minimizing the label stack size. However, we argue that these methods ignore the constraint on the maximum segment list depth (SLD), since the typical network equipment can currently only support three to five layers of labels. In this paper, we study segment routing with the maximum SLD constraint and demonstrate that issues, such as explosive increases in the size of the label space and the management overheads will arise when the maximum SLD constraint is imposed. To address these issues, we make contributions from two main aspects. First, based on the network programmability that is provided by openflow, a novel segment routing architecture with improved data plane is proposed that reduces the overhead of additional flow entries and label space. Second, a new path encoding scheme is designed to minimize the SLD under the given maximum constraint, while taking multiple types of overhead into consideration. Moreover, we also perform simulations under different scenarios to evaluate the performances of the proposed algorithms. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed mechanisms and algorithms can address the issues of segment routing when there is a constraint on the maximum SLD.

Segment routing (SR) is a new routing paradigm to provide traffic engineering (TE) capabilities in an IP network. The main feature of SR is that no signaling protocols are needed, since extensions of the interior gateway protocol routing protocols are used. Despite the benefit that SR brings, introducing a new technology into an operational network presents many difficulties. In particular, the network operators consider both capital expenditure and performance degradation as drawbacks for the deployment of the new technology; for this reason, an incremental approach is preferred. In this paper, we face the challenge of managing the transition between a pure IP network to a full SR one while optimizing the network performances. We focus our attention on a network scenario where: 1) only a subset of nodes are SR-capable and 2) the TE objective is the minimization of the maximum link utilization. For such a scenario, we propose an architectural solution, named SR domain (SRD), to guarantee the proper interworking between the IP routers and the SR nodes. We propose a mixed integer linear programming formulation to solve the SRD design problem, consisting in identifying the subset of SR nodes; moreover, a strategy to manage the routing inside the SRD is defined. The performance evaluation shows that the hybrid IP/SR network based on SRD offers TE opportunities comparable to the one of a full SR network. Finally, a heuristic method to identify nodes to be inserted in the set of nodes composing the SRD is discussed.

Fixed and mobile telecom operators, enterprise network operators and cloud providers strive to face the challenging demands coming from the evolution of IP networks (e.g. huge bandwidth requirements, integration of billions of devices and millions of services in the cloud). Proposed in the early 2010s, Segment Routing (SR) architecture helps face these challenging demands, and it is currently being adopted and deployed. SR architecture is based on the concept of source routing and has interesting scalability properties, as it dramatically reduces the amount of state information to be configured in the core nodes to support complex services. SR architecture was first implemented with the MPLS dataplane and then, quite recently, with the IPv6 dataplane (SRv6). IPv6 SR architecture (SRv6) has been extended from the simple steering of packets across nodes to a general network programming approach, making it very suitable for use cases such as Service Function Chaining and Network Function Virtualization. In this paper we present a tutorial and a comprehensive survey on SR technology, analyzing standardization efforts, patents, research activities and implementation results. We start with an introduction on the motivations for Segment Routing and an overview of its evolution and standardization. Then, we provide a tutorial on Segment Routing technology, with a focus on the novel SRv6 solution. We discuss the standardization efforts and the patents providing details on the most important documents and mentioning other ongoing activities. We then thoroughly analyze research activities according to a taxonomy. We have identified 8 main categories during our analysis of the current state of play: Monitoring, Traffic Engineering, Failure Recovery, Centrally Controlled Architectures, Path Encoding, Network Programming, Performance Evaluation and Miscellaneous..., SUBMITTED TO IEEE COMMUNICATIONS SURVEYS & TUTORIALS

Because of increased number of network devices in the world, as well as the need for the network environment to provide dynamics of faults and adaptability to load changes, it is difficult and complicated network to be managed. By applying an approach called Software Defined Networks (SDN), the separation of the control and data planes is achieved. This allows the creation and deployment of new network applications to be easier, as well as provides simplification and flexibility in network policy enforcement, facilitating network configuration and management. The main problems in SDN are load balancing and segment routing. This paper proposes a model which aims to reduce not only the overall load on the network, but also to reduce the bandwidth and improve the routing mechanism on the SDN networks. It combines segment routing algorithm and load balancing mechanisms based on machine learning.

IEEE Segment Routing (SR) is a new fertile ground for Traffic Engineering (TE). By decomposing forwarding paths into segments, which specify a list of intermediate delivery points that a packet must visit on its way to the final destination, SR improves TE tasks and enables new solutions for the optimization of network resource utilization. This work proposes an Evolutionary Computation approach that enables Path Computation Element (PCE), or Software-defined Network (SDN) controllers, to optimize SR configurations for improved traffic distribution. Furthermore, we present a robust semi-oblivious method to address the variability of traffic requirements as well as alternative approaches to ensure a good network performance after link failures. In all cases, the optimization of network resource utilization is achieved using at the most three segments to configure each SR path. Moreover, all proposed optimization methods are made publicly available in a optimization framework developed by the authors., This work has been supported by FCT – Fundac ̧ ̃ao para aCiˆencia e Tecnologia within the R&D Units Project Scope: UIDB/00319/2020.

Network Function Virtualization is a new technology allowing for a elastic cloud and bandwidth resource allocation. The technology requires an orchestrator whose role is the service and resource orchestration. It receives service requests, each one characterized by a Service Function Chain, which is a set of service functions to be executed according to a given order. It implements an algorithm for deciding where both to allocate the cloud and bandwidth resources and to route the SFCs. In a traditional orchestration algorithm, the orchestrator has a detailed knowledge of the cloud and network infrastructures and that can lead to high computational complexity of the SFC Routing and Cloud and Bandwidth resource Allocation (SRCBA) algorithm. In this paper, we propose and evaluate the effectiveness of a scalable orchestration architecture inherited by the one proposed within the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and based on the functional separation of an NFV orchestrator in Resource Orchestrator (RO) and Network Service Orchestrator (NSO). Each cloud domain is equipped with an RO whose task is to provide a simple and abstract representation of the cloud infrastructure. These representations are notified of the NSO that can apply a simplified and less complex SRCBA algorithm. In addition, we show how the segment routing technology can help to simplify the SFC routing by means of an effective addressing of the service functions. The scalable orchestration solution has been investigated and compared to the one of a traditional orchestrator in some network scenarios and varying the number of cloud domains. We have verified that the execution time of the SRCBA algorithm can be drastically reduced without degrading the performance in terms of cloud and bandwidth resource costs.

Large-scale data centers are major infrastructures in the big data era. Therefore, a stable and optimized architecture is required for data center networks (DCNs) to provide services to the applications. Many studies use software-defined network (SDN)-based multipath TCP (MPTCP) implementation to utilize the entire DCN’s performance and achieve good results. However, the deployment cost is high. In SDN-based MPTCP solutions, the flow allocation mechanism leads to a large number of forwarding rules, which may lead to storage consumption. Considering the advantages and limitations of the SDN-based MPTCP solution, we aim to reduce the deployment cost due to the use of an extremely expensive storage resource—ternary content addressable memory (TCAM). We combine MPTCP and segment routing (SR) for traffic management to limit the storage requirements. And to the best of our knowledge, we are among the first to use the collaboration of MPTCP and SR in multi-rooted DCN topologies. To explain how MPTCP and SR work together, we use four-layer DCN architecture for better description, which contains physical topology, SR over the topology, multiple path selection supplied by MPTCP, and traffic scheduling on the selected paths. Finally, we implement the proposed design in a simulated SDN-based DCN environment. The simulation results reveal the great benefits of such a collaborative approach.

Segment Routing (SR) combines the simplicity of Link-State routing protocols with the flexibility of Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS). By decomposing forwarding paths into segments, identified by labels, SR improves Traffic Engineering (TE) and enables new solutions for the optimization of network resources utilization. This work proposes an Evolutionary Computation approach that enables Path Computation Element (PCE) or Software-defined Network (SDN) controllers to optimize label switching paths for congestion avoidance while using at the most three labels to configure each label switching path., This work has been supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT Fundac¸˜ao para a Ciˆencia e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013., info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

In this paper the advantages of reconfiguring the cloud and bandwidth resources in a Network Function Virtualization (NFV) architecture based on Segment Routing control/data plane is investigated when a number of maximum Service Function Chain (SFC) reconfigurations is permitted. An algorithm based on an evaluation of weight constrained shortest paths is proposed and the impact of the number of maximum permitted SFC reconfigurations on the total cloud and bandwidth cost saving is evaluated. From the results we can observe how is some cases the constraint on the number of permitted SFC reconfigurations can lead to a remarkable cost saving reduction.

Motivated by conversations with operators and by possibilities to unlock future Internet-based applications, we study how to enable Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to reliably offer connectivity through disjoint paths as an advanced, value-added service. As ISPs are increasingly deploying Segment Routing (SR), we focus on implementing such service with SR. We introduce the concept of robustly disjoint paths, pairs of paths that are constructed to remain disjoint even after an input set of failures, with no external intervention (e.g., configuration change). We extend the routing theory, study the problem complexity, and design efficient algorithms to automatically compute SR-based robustly disjoint paths. Our algorithms enable a fully automated approach to offer the disjoint-path connectivity, based on configuration synthesis. Our evaluation on real topologies shows that such an approach is practical, and scales to large ISP networks.

Software-defined networks (SDNs) are improving the controllability and flexibility of networks as an innovative network architecture paradigm. Segment routing (SR) exploits an end-to-end logical path and is composed of a sequence of segments as an effective routing strategy. Each segment is represented by a middle point. The combination of SR and SDN can meet the differentiated business needs of users and can quickly deploy applications. In this paper, we propose two routing algorithms based on SR in SDN. The algorithms aim to save the cost of the path, alleviate the congestion of networks, and formulate the selection strategy by comprehensively evaluating the value of paths. The simulation results show that compared with existing algorithms, the two proposed algorithms can effectively reduce the consumption of paths and better balance the load of the network. Furthermore, the proposed algorithms take into account the preferences of users, actualize differentiated business networks, and achieve a larger comprehensive evaluation value of the path compared with other algorithms.

In this work we investigate the use of Segment Routing version 6 (SRv6) interface counters to improve the Traffic Matrix (TM) assessment of an ISP network. SRv6 is a source routing solution for IPv6 networks: it allows defining a network path as a sequence of routers, represented by Segments Identifiers (SID), to be crossed, i.e. a Segment List (SL). SRv6 provides a new set of interface counters able to measure the packets/bytes of Ingress/Egress flows exploiting the forwarding operations performed on the Segment Identifiers (SIDs) reported in the SLs. In this work, we formally define the contribution of SR counters in the TM computation procedure, by integrating them in the classical TM Assessment problem. The main outcome of the performance analysis are: i) SR counters can greatly reduce the estimation error and, ii) there is a correlation between the TM assessment improvement and the SLs structure.

The Ingress Egress Traffic Matrix (IE TM) assessment is a fundamental step of the network management for an ISP network, since it represents the key input parameter used by any Traffic Engineering solution to optimize the resource utilization and to improve the Quality of Service. The actual TM assessment procedures are based on estimation algorithms or measurement based approaches. This paper presents a method to measure the intensity of traffic flows, that overcomes the limits of the classical measurement/estimation based approaches. The idea is to exploit the flexibility of the Segment Routing paradigm to implement controlled routing changes so that to measure the intensity of a subset of network flows. The main contribution of the work is to show the feasibility of the proposed approach by means of a low complexity heuristic, referred to as Path Cost Bases (PaCoB), able to identify the list of routing changes that allow to improve the TM assessment procedure. The heuristic is composed of successive steps, referred to as snapshots: in each snapshot the routing of a set of flows is changed so that to assess their intensities. The performance evaluation show thatPaCoB assesses the intensity of more than 90% of flows. Moreover, when used in conjunction with an estimation algorithm, PaCoB allows to reduce the estimation error by more than 50% performing only 10 snapshots.

IPv6 Segment Routing (SRv6) is a modern version of source routing that is being standardised within the IETF to address a variety of use cases in ISP, datacenter and entreprise net- works. Its inclusion in recent versions of the Linux kernel enables researchers to explore and extend this new protocol. We leverage and extend the SRv6 implementation in the Linux kernel to demonstrate two very different usages of this new protocol. We first show how entreprise networks can leverage SRv6 to better control the utilisation of their infrastructure and demonstrate how DNS resolvers can act as SDN controllers. We then demonstrate how SRv6Pipes can be used to efficiently implement network functions that need to process bytestreams on top of a packet-based SRv6 network.

Network service chaining, originally conceived in the network function virtualization (NFV) framework for software defined networks (SDN), is becoming an attractive solution for enabling service differentiation enforcement to microflows generated by data centers, 5G fronthaul and Internet of Things (IoT) cloud/fog nodes, and traversing a metro-core network. However, the current IP/MPLS-over optical multi-layer network is practically unable to provide such service chain enforcement. First, MPLS granularity prevents microflows from being conveyed in dedicated paths. Second, service configuration for a huge number of selected flows with different requirements is prone to scalability concerns, even considering the deployment of a SDN network. In this paper, effective service chaining enforcement along traffic engineered (TE) paths is proposed using segment routing and extended traffic steering mechanisms for mapping micro-flows. The proposed control architecture is based on an extended SDN controller encompassing a stateful path computation element (PCE) handling microflow computation and placement supporting service chains, whereas segment routing allows automatic service enforcement without the need for continuous configuration of the service node. The proposed solution is experimentally evaluated in segment routing over an elastic optical network (EON) network testbed with a deep packet inspection service supporting dynamic and automatic flow enforcement using Border Gateway Protocol with Flow Specification (BGP Flowspec) and OpenFlow protocols as alternative traffic steering enablers. Scalability of flow computation, placement, and steering are also evaluated showing the effectiveness of the proposed solution.

Segment routing is an implementation of the source routing paradigm built over an Interior Gateway Protocol. It allows improving Traffic Engineering in IP/MPLS networks by decomposing forwarding paths in lists of smaller paths called segments. The flexibility introduced by segment routing enables new responsive and dynamic methods to react to network fault events, such as link failures. Typical responses to single link failures only aim to reestablish loop-free connectivity between affected routers and do not account for impacts in network congestion. As Interior Gateway Protocols recompute shortest-paths after a link failure, SR paths and links utilization are affected by the fault augmenting the overall network congestion. This paper addresses this problem comparing post-convergence network congestion values obtained with industry and new proposal Evolutionary Computation based recovery path computation methods for segment routing. Furthermore, by comparing and analyzing each method's advantages and disadvantages, we show that a multiplane optimization procedure stands out with best results., This work has been supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013.

International audience; As experimenting with energy-aware techniques on large-scale production infrastructure is prohibitive , a large number of proposed traffic-engineering strategies have been evaluated only using discrete-event simulations. The present work discusses (i) challenges towards building testbeds that allow researchers and practitioners to validate and evaluate the performance and quality of energy-aware traffic-engineering strategies , (ii) requirements to fulfill when porting simulations to testbeds, and (iii) two proof-of-concept testbeds. One testbed uses and provides Software-Defined Network (SDN) services created on the Open Network Operating System (ONOS) while the other is a composition of virtual Open vSwitches (OVS) controlled by the Ryu SDN framework. The aim of the testbeds is to validate previously proposed energy-aware traffic engineering strategies in different environments. We detail the platforms and illustrate how they have been used for performance evaluation. Additionally, the paper compares results obtained in the testbeds with evaluations performed using discrete-event simulations and presents challenges faced while implementing energy-aware traffic engineering mechanisms as SDN services in testbed environments.

National audience; This research paper proposes IEEE802.3az incorporated green algorithmic schemes on the software defined networking-based segment routing (SDN-based SR) centralized network. The proposed schemes are the green (i.e. the EAGER and CARE metrics) SDN-based SR networks with and without traffic engineering (TE) tunneling. Green metrics extend the IEEE 802.3az energy saving to the whole network, while tunneling avoids the load sharing mechanism included in the segment routing that is not convenient for energy saving purpose. The findings of emulation revealed that the energy efficiency under the EAGER-tunneling strategy is comparable to the conventional metric with TE tunneling, and the saving realized under the CARE-tunneling scheme is twofold in comparison with the LEGACY-tunneling strategy. Meanwhile, the energy saving performance achieved with all three metrics under TE non-tunneling was inferior to those with tunneling. Nonetheless, the lower end-to-end delay and lower maximum link utilization (MLU) were achievable with the non-tunneling strategy.

This work demonstrates a hierarchical control plane architecture for Software Defined Networking (SDN)-based Segment Routing (SR) in multi-domain networks. An orchestrator application, on top of multiple open source SDN controllers, creates a hierarchical control plane architecture using northbound RESTFul APIs of controllers. The orchestrator has control, visibility and traffic engineering capabilities to manage multi-domain SR service creation. Standard southbound interfaces with proper SR extensions are exploited to manage SR tunnels in the MPLS data plane.

Traffic Engineering (TE) algorithms aims at determining the packet routing paths in order to satisfy specific QoS requirements. These paths are normally established through control procedures e.g., exchange of RSVP messages in MPLS networks or links weights modification in pure IP networks. An increase of control traffic or long convergence time intervals, respectively, are the drawbacks of these solutions. Segment Routing (SR) is a new network paradigm able to implement TE routing strategies over legacy IP/MPLS networks with no need of dedicated signaling procedures. This result is obtained by inserting in each packet header an ordered list of instructions, called Segments List, that indicates the path to be crossed. This paper provides the formulation of the Segment List Encoding problem i.e., the detection of the proper Segment Lists to obtain TE network paths minimizing the Segment Lists sizes. The SL encoding procedure is composed of two steps: i) the creation of an auxiliary graph representing the forwarding paths between the couple of source and destination nodes; ii) the solution of a Multi-commodity Flow (MCF) problem over the auxiliary graph. The performance evaluation shows that properly performing SL encoding allows to implement TE outcome with a reduced reconfiguration cost with respect to E2E tunneling and Hop-by-Hop solutions; moreover a significant advantage in terms of packets overhead is obtained.

International audience; The continuous growth of traffic and the energy consumption of network equipments can limit the deployment of large-scale distributed infrastructure. This work aims to improve the energy efficiency of backbone networks by dynamically adjusting the number of active links according to network load. We propose an intra-domain software-defined network approach to select and turn off a subset of links. The SPRING protocol (a.k.a. segment routing) is used to make our algorithms converge faster. The algorithms—implemented and evaluated using the OMNET++ discrete event simulator—can achieve energy savings of around 44 % when considering real backbone networks.

Segment routing has recently been proposed in the IETF toward making IP/MPLS networks service-oriented while simplifying network operations. Segment routing computes paths at the source node using node identifiers and adjacency identifiers conjoined together to create a source-routed path. We propose a scalable transport paradigm as an enabler toward implementing segment routing in provider networks. We propose omnipresent Ethernet, our modification of carrier Ethernet (which is based on source-routed, binary-routed labels embedded in an Ethernet frame), to implement segment routing. We identify some of the scalability issues of the segment-routing proposal in the context of source-routing overhead. To absolve scalability issues of segment routing, two routing schemes that implement multidomain source-routing techniques are proposed. The hierarchical segment-routing (H-SR) scheme is proposed, which deploys a limited number of special nodes called swap nodes that are capable of label swapping to implement routing. The swap-node placement problem is formulated as an integer linear program to minimize the total routing distance within a network. Three heuristic techniques for swap-node selection based on centrality paradigms are presented. The H-SR scheme is further improved by a proposed multisegment-routing (M-SR) scheme that assumes all nodes in the network to be capable of label swapping. The H-SR and M-SR schemes are shown to significantly enhance the scalability of segment routing. A test-bed is built using carrier Ethernet hardware to support segment routing that validates the implementation of the proposed schemes. A simulation model to evaluate the schemes from a scalability perspective and their associated trade-offs is presented.

SDN simplifies network management by relying on declarativity (high-level interface) and expressiveness (network flexibility). We propose a solution to support those features while preserving high robustness and scalability as needed in carrier-grade networks. Our solution is based on (i) a two-layer architecture separating connectivity and optimization tasks; and (ii) a centralized optimizer called framework, which translates high-level goals expressed almost in natural language into compliant network configurations. Our evaluation on real and synthetic topologies shows that framework improves the state of the art by (i) achieving better trade-offs for classic goals covered by previous works, (ii) supporting a larger set of goals (refined traffic engineering and service chaining), and (iii) optimizing large ISP networks in few seconds. We also quantify the gains of our implementation, running Segment Routing on top of IS-IS, over possible alternatives (RSVP-TE and OpenFlow).

International audience; Energy consumption has become a limiting factor for deploying large-scale distributed infrastructures. This work 1 seeks to improve the energy efficiency of backbone networks by providing an intra-domain Software Defined Network (SDN) approach to selectively turn off a subset of links. We propose the STREETE framework (SegmenT Routing based Energy Efficient Traffic Engineering) that dynamically adapts the number of powered-on links to the traffic load. The core of the solution relies on SPRING, a novel protocol being standardized by IETF. It is also known under the name of Segment Routing. The algorithms have been implemented and evaluated using the OMNET++ simulator. Experimental results show that the consumption of 44% of links can be reduced while preserving good quality of service.