Tag Archives: editorial

Mosaic5G: Agile and Flexible Service Platforms for 5G Research

Navid Nikaein, Chia-Yu Chang, Konstantinos Alexandris
Abstract

Network slicing is one of the key enablers to provide the required flexibility and to realize the service-oriented vision toward fifth generation (5G) mobile networks. In that sense, virtualization, softwarization, and disaggregation are core concepts to accommodate the requirements of an end-to-end (E2E) service to be either isolated, shared, or customized. They lay the foundation for a multi-service and multi-tenant architecture, and are realized by applying the principles of software-defined networking (SDN), network function virtualization (NFV), and cloud computing to the mobile networks. Research on these principles requires agile and flexible platforms that offer a wide range of real-world experimentations over different domains to open up innovations in 5G. To this end, we present Mosaic5G, a community-led consortium for sharing platforms, providing a number of software components, namely FlexRAN, LL-MEC, JOX and Store, spanning application, management, control and user plane on top of OpenAirInterface (OAI) platform. Finally, we show several use cases of Mosaic5G corresponding to widely-mentioned 5G research directions.

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NDN Host Model

Haitao Zhang, Yanbiao Li , Zhiyi Zhang, Alexander Afanasyev, Lixia Zhang
Abstract

As a proposed Internet architecture, Named Data Networking (NDN) changes the network communication model from delivering packets to destinations identified by IP addresses to fetching data packets by names. This architectural change leads to changes of host functions and initial configurations. In this paper we present an overview of the host functions in an NDN network, together with necessary operations to configure an NDN host.We also compare and contrast the functionality and configuration between an NDN host and an IP host, to help readers see the differences in between clearly.

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Workshop on Internet Economics (WIE2017) Final Report

KC Claffy, Geoff Huston  David Clark,
Abstract

On December 13-14 2017, CAIDA hosted the 8th interdisciplinary
Workshop on Internet Economics (WIE) at the UC San Diego’s Supercomputer Center. This workshop series provides a forum for researchers, Internet facilities and service providers, technologists, economists, theorists, policy makers, and other stakeholders to exchange views on current and emerging regulatory and policy debates. The FCC’s expected decision (released during the workshop, on 14 December 2017) — to repeal the 2015 classification of broadband Internet access service as a telecommunications
(common carrier) service — set the stage for vigorous discussion on what type of data can inform debate, development, and empirical evaluation of public policies we will need for Internet services in the future.

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The April 2018 Issue

This issue starts with two technical articles that provide artefacts. The first one, Scanning the Internet for Liveness, written by a team of eight researchers led by S. Bano uses the ZMap software to probe the IPv4 addressing space for Internet hosts that respond to different types of probes. They propose different liveness probes that use ICMP, TCP and UDP. Their scans of the IPv4 Internet revealed that different protocols (or ports for TCP/UDP) provide different results as different types of hosts respond or not to different types of probes. Furthermore, collecting ICMP error messages for the TCP and UDP probes is important to increase the coverage. The authors release their modification to ZMap that includes the proposed probes and data collected during their measurement campaigns.

The second technical paper that provides artefacts is A First Look at Certifi- cation Authority Authorization (CAA) was co-authored by eleven researchers led by Q. Scheitle. This is also a measurement paper that tries to understand how the Certification Authority Authorization (CAA) DNS record is actually used by Certification Authorities (CA), domain holders and DNS operators. This is a timely paper since RFC6844 mandates that CAs validate CAA records as of September 8, 2017. Their study reveals some anomalies for already-issued certificates and they provide some guidelines to improve the security impact of CAA. Their study continues and you can follow the updated results on https://caastudy. github.io. The authors release both the collected data and their analysis tools.

In our third technical paper, Towards Slack-Aware Networking, Fahad Dogar proposes a new architecture targeted at machine-to-machine communications where hosts could indicate some slack when transmitting packets to let the network optimise their delivery to reduce the consumption of network ressources. This new idea still needs to be implemented and validated but it could open new directions of research.

In addition to the technical papers, this issue also contains three editorial notes. In VANETs’ research over the past decade: overview, credibility, and trends, E. Caval- canti et al. provide a detailed survey of the research in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) during the last decade and analyse 283 papers according to different criterias. They release the collected data as paper artefacts. In Failures from the Environment, a Report on the First FAILSAFE workshop, M. Breza et al. summarise the FAILSAFE 2017 workshop held at the SenSys 2017 conference. Finally, I. Baldin et al. summarise in The Future of Distributed Network Research Infrastructure the lessons that they learned from the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) infrastructure and provide several directions for future research projects.

I hope that you will enjoy reading this new issue and welcome comments and suggestions on CCR Online or by email at ccr-editor at sigcomm.org.

Olivier Bonaventure

CCR Editor

VANETs’ research over the past decade: overview, credibility, and trends

Elmano Ramalho Cavalcanti, Jose Anderson Rodrigues de Souza, Marco Aurelio Spohn, Reinaldo Cezar de Morais Gomes, Anderson Fabiano Batista Ferreira da Costa

Abstract

Since its inception, Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) have been attracting much attention from both academia and industry. As for other wireless networking areas, scientific advancements are mainly due to the employment of simulation tools and mathematical models. After surveying 283 papers published in the last decade on vehicular networking, we pinpoint the main studied topics as well the most employed tools, pointing out the changes in research subject preference over the years. As a key contribution, we also evaluate to what extent the research community has evolved concerning the principles of credibility in simulation-based studies, such as repeatability and replicability, comparing our results with previous studies.

Download the full article DOI:10.1145/3213232.3213237

Failures from the Environment, a Report on the First FAILSAFE workshop

Michael Breza, Ivana Tomic, Julie McCann

Abstract

This document presents the views expressed in the submissions and discussions at the FAILSAFE workshop about the common problems that plague embedded sensor system deployments in the wild. We present analysis gathered from the submissions and the panel session of the FAILSAFE 2017 workshop held at the SenSys 2017 conference. The FAILSAFE call for papers specifically asked for descriptions of wireless sensor network (WSN) deployments and their problems and failures. The submissions, the questions raised at the presentations, and the panel discussion give us a sufficient body of work to review, and draw conclusions regarding the effect that the environment has as the most common cause of embedded sensor system failures.

Download the full article DOI:10.1145/3213232.3213238

The Future of CISE Distributed Research Infrastructure

Ilya Baldin, Tilman Wolf, et al.

Abstract

The following paper represents an initial snapshot of the community vision for a possible future of CISE distributed research infrastructure aimed at enabling new types of research and discoveries. As such, it is only the first step in helping define this vision. It is expected that it will change over time as the research community contributes new ideas.

Download the full article DOI:10.1145/3213232.3213239

The January 2018 issue

Computer Communication Review (CCR) continues to promote reproducible re- search by encouraging the submission of papers providing artifacts (software, datasets, . . . ). The editorial board also evolves. Katherina Argyraki, Athina Markopoulos and Fabian Bustamante have stepped down after several years of service to our community. Thanks again for all your effort in handling papers submitted to CCR. I’m happy to announce that four new editors have agreed to serve the community : KC Claffy (CAIDA), Phillipa Gill (UMass), Anna Sperotto (University of Twente) and Hamed Haddadi (Imperial College).

The first three technical papers provide artefacts to enable other researchers to reproduce and expand their work. In Relaxing state-access constraints in stateful programmable data planes, C. Cascone and his colleagues propose a new model for pipelined stateful packet processing in hardware and evaluate this design with trace-driven simulations. They release their trace-driven simulator. In Towards a Rigorous Methodology for Measuring Adoption of RPKI Route Validation and Filtering, A. Reuter and his colleagues study interdomain routing security. After many discussions, the ISP community has agreed to deploy Route Origin Authorization (ROA) to improve the security of interdomain routing. As we are currently at the beginning of this deployment, little is known about how those ROAs are actually used by network operators. One question is whether network operators use ROAs to validate interdomain routes before accepting them. A. Reuter et al. first tried to reproduce a measurement methodology proposed in a recent paper that unfortunately did not release software or datasets. They explain why they could not succeed to repro- duce those results and propose a more accurate methodology that enables them to correctly identify which network operators validate ROAs. They release the source code for their methodology and have launched a companion website that tracks this deployment at https://rov.rpki.net.

In Open Connect Everywhere: A Glimpse at the Internet Ecosystem through the Lens of the Netflix CDN, T. Bottger and his colleagues analyse the role that Internet eXchange Points (IXPs) play in the deployment of a large content provider such as Netflix. K. Foerster et al. propose in Local Fast Failover Routing With Low Stretch new algorithms to reroute flows in case of failures. In Charting the Algorithmic Complexity of Waypoint Routing S. Amiri et al. provide an overview of algorithmic techniques to route flows through specific waypoints, e.g. to support Network Function Virtualisation. Finally, M. Arashloo et al. propose and evaluate A Scalable VPN Gateway for Multi-Tenant Cloud Services.

In addition to the technical papers, this issue also contains four editorial notes. The first editorial note, ex uno pluria: The Service-Infrastructure Cycle, Ossification, and the Fragmentation of the Internet, was initially written as a conference keynote by M. Ammar. In this note, he takes a step back and look at some examples of successful deployments of network services. He identifies the Service-Infrastructure Cycle as one of the reasons to explain the success of some network services. P. Sermpezis reports in A Survey among Network Operators on BGP Prefix Hijacking the results of a recent survey that will be of interest for researchers working on interdomain routing or security.

The last two editorial notes discuss the reproducibility of networking research. In Thoughts and Recommendations from the ACM SIGCOMM 2017 Reproducibility Workshop, D. Saucez and L. Iannone sum- marise the main conclusions of a workshop organised during SIGCOMM 2017. Finally, M. Flittner et al. analyse in A Survey on Artifacts from CoNEXT, ICN, IMC, and SIGCOMM Conferences in 2017 the artifacts re- leased by the authors of the papers published at CoNEXT, ICN, IMC and SIGCOMM last year. This survey shows that there is a growing interest in releasing artefacts within the broad SIGCOMM community.

I hope that you will enjoy reading this new issue and welcome comments and suggestions on CCR Online or by email at ccr-editor at sigcomm.org.

Olivier Bonaventure

CCR Editor

ex uno pluria: The Service-Infrastructure Cycle, Ossification, and the Fragmentation of the Internet

Mostafa Ammar

Abstract

In this article I will first argue that a Service-Infrastructure Cycle is fundamental to networking evolution. Networks are built to accommodate certain services at an expected scale. New applications and/or a significant increase in scale require a rethinking of network mechanisms which results in new deployments. Four decades-worth of iterations of this process have yielded the Internet as we know it today, a common and shared global networking infrastructure that delivers almost all services. I will further argue, using brief historical case studies, that success of network mechanism deployments often hinges on whether or not mechanism evolution follows the iterations of this Cycle. Many have observed that this network, the Internet, has become ossified and unable to change in response to new demands. In other words, after decades of operation, the Service-Infrastructure Cycle has become stuck. However, novel service requirements and scale increases continue to exert significant pressure on this ossified infrastructure. The result, I will conjecture, will be a fragmentation, the beginnings of which are evident today, that will ultimately fundamentally change the character of the network infrastructure. By ushering in a ManyNets world, this fragmentation will lubricate the Service-Infrastructure Cycle so that it can continue to govern the evolution of networking. I conclude this article with a brief discussion of the possible implications of this emerging ManyNets world on networking research.

Download the full article DOI: 10.1145/3211852.3211861

A Survey among Network Operators on BGP Prefix Hijacking

Pavlos Sermpezis, Vasileios Kotronis, Alberto Dainotti, Xenofontas Dimitropoulos

Abstract

BGP prefix hijacking is a threat to Internet operators and users. Several mechanisms or modifications to BGP that protect the Internet against it have been proposed. However, the reality is that most operators have not deployed them and are reluctant to do so in the near future. Instead, they rely on basic – and often inefficient – proactive defenses to reduce the impact of hijacking events, or on detection based on third party services and reactive approaches that might take up to several hours. In this work, we present the results of a survey we conducted among 75 network operators to study: (a) the operators’ awareness of BGP prefix hijacking attacks, (b) presently used defenses (if any) against BGP prefix hijacking, (c) the willingness to adopt new defense mechanisms, and (d) reasons that may hinder the deployment of BGP prefix hijacking defenses. We expect the findings of this survey to increase the understanding of existing BGP hijacking defenses and the needs of network operators, as well as contribute towards designing new defense mechanisms that satisfy the requirements of the operators.

Download the full article DOI: 10.1145/3211852.3211862