Innovative Network Architecture Research Articles

3DStreaming: an open-source flexible framework for real-time 3D streaming services

The progress of three-dimensional 3D technologies, together with the wide diffusion of both Internet and broadband technologies, is paving the way to emerging live streaming services which have been conceived for delivering 3D video contents in real-time fashion to end users. Nowadays, the only available tools supporting stereoscopic 3D video services cannot be freely downloaded and require the adoption of owner stereoscopic players. Motivated by the lack of an effective solution, we developed a freeware and open source 3D live streaming framework, namely 3DStreaming. It provides stereoscopic 3D live streaming services over the Internet. In particular, it realizes a complete server implementation, offering the support for any transmission protocol and encoding scheme, as well as the full compatibility with any network architecture (i.e., LAN, MAN, Internet, and so on). At the same time, it allows users to use the preferable stereoscopic player and to render the video through any technique available for the chosen player. The overall performances of the proposed tool have been presented by testing its behavior in several network configurations (i.e., by varying network topology, coding technique, 3D representation format, and average encoding rate). All the measured metrics, which include the number of RTP segments that are transmitted and received, the frame loss ratio, and the PSNR, fully demonstrate the right behavior of the implemented tool in all the considered scenarios. We believe that, thanks to its high flexibility, this tool can be exploited by researchers working on stereoscopic-3D related issues to design, test, and evaluate novel and innovative algorithms, protocols, and network architectures.

Cooperative and cognitive satellite systems

Cooperative and Cognitive Satellite Systems provides a solid overview of the current research in the field of cooperative and cognitive satellite systems, helping users understand how to incorporate state-of-the-art communication techniques in innovative satellite network architectures to enable the next generation of satellite systems. The book is edited and written by top researchers and practitioners in the field, providing a comprehensive explanation of current research that allows users to discover future technologies and their applications, integrate satellite and terrestrial systems and services to create innovative network architectures, understand the requirements and possibilities for future satellite communications standards and protocols, and evaluate the feasibility and practical constraints involved in the deployment process. Provides a solid overview of the current research in the field of co-operative and cognitive satellite systemsPresents concepts in multibeam and multicarrier joint processing and high performance random access schemes Explains hybrid and dual satellite systems, cognitive broadband satellite systems, spectrum exploitation, and resource allocation

High-Speed Design of Conflictless Name Lookup and Efficient Selective Cache on CCN Router

Content-centric networking (CCN) is an innovative network architecture that is being considered as a successor to the Internet. In recent years, CCN has received increasing attention from all over the world because its novel technologies (e.g., caching, multicast, aggregating requests) and communication based on names that act as addresses for content have the potential to resolve various problems facing the Internet. To implement these technologies, however, requires routers with performance far superior to that offered by today's Internet routers. Although many researchers have proposed various router components, such as caching and name lookup mechanisms, there are few router-level designs incorporating all the necessary components. The design and evaluation of a complete router is the primary contribution of this paper. We provide a concrete hardware design for a router model that uses three basic tables — forwarding information base (FIB), pending interest table (PIT), and content store (CS) — and incorporates two entities that we propose. One of these entities is the name lookup entity, which looks up a name address within a few cycles from content-addressable memory by use of a Bloom filter; the other is the interest count entity, which counts interest packets that require certain content and selects content worth caching. Our contributions are (1) presenting a proper algorithm for looking up and matching name addresses in CCN communication, (2) proposing a method to process CCN packets in a way that achieves high throughput and very low latency, and (3) demonstrating feasible performance and cost on the basis of a concrete hardware design using distributed content-addressable memory.

A Survey of Green Information-Centric Networking: Research Issues and Challenges

Recently, a series of innovative information-centric networking (ICN) architectures have been designed to better address the shift from host-centric end-to-end communication to requester-driven content retrieval. With the explosive increase of mobile data traffic, the mobility issue in ICN is a growing concern and a number of approaches have been proposed to deal with the mobility problem in ICN. Despite the potential advantages of ICN in mobile wireless environments, several significant research challenges remain to be addressed before its widespread deployment, including consistent routing, local cached content discovery, energy efficiency, privacy, security and trust, and practical deployment. In this paper, we present a brief survey on some of the works that have already been done to achieve mobile ICN, and discuss some research issues and challenges. We identify several important aspects of mobile ICN: overview, mobility enabling technologies, information-centric wireless mobile networks, and research challenges.

A survey of energy-efficient caching in information-centric networking

To better cope with the Internet usage shift from host-centric end-to-end communication to receiver-driven content retrieval, innovative information-centric networking (ICN) architectures have been proposed. A notable advantage of these novel networking architectures is to provide transparent and ubiquitous in-network caching to speed up content distribution and improve network resource utilization. With the explosive increase of global network traffic, the energy efficiency issue in ICN is a growing concern. In this article, we provide a brief survey of energy-efficient caching techniques in ICN from the placement, content placement, and requestto- cache routing perspectives. We also outline some challenges and future research directions about caching policies for green ICN.

Synchronization Issues in an Innovative Wireless Sensor Network Architecture Monitoring Ambient Vibrations in Historical Buildings

The problem of bridging the gap between the traditional wired monitoring systems and the wireless ones, was the objective of an innovative network architecture that elegantly combined benefits from both approaches. The monitoring focus is on historical buildings in which installing wires maybe range from difficult (e.g., fragile constructions) to impossible (e.g., prohibitive legislation). However, this innovative approach is vulnerable with respect to synchronization issues. In particular, all data sensed by different sensors need to have the correct universal time stamp. Since under this approach there is no central entity to take a synchronization role, in this paper the use of a local NTP server is proposed and as it is shown here using experimental results, this approach suffices for the particular monitoring needs. Thus, the claim that the innovative system can efficiently support the required monitoring of ambient vibrations in historical buildings.

A Wireless Sensor Network Innovative Architecture for Ambient Vibrations Structural Monitoring

Wireless sensor networks can be beneficial for monitoring ambient vibrations in historical buildings where the installation of traditionally wired system may be either difficult due to wiring difficulties or forbidden due to prohibitive legislation. In this paper, a novel wireless sensor network architecture is presented that is focusing on efficiently monitoring ambient vibrations in historical buildings. Traditional wired monitoring technologies are often difficult to be installed in historical buildings either to high costs for installing the wires or to prohibitive legislations. Employing a wireless system could be beneficial. However, as there is no wireless system of high resolution available in the market, an innovative network architecture is proposed that efficiently combines the benefits of both the wired and wireless systems. The problem of synchronization that this novel architecture introduces, is also discussed in this paper along with a possible solution.

Innovative Large Scale Wireless Sensor Network Architecture Using Satellites and High-Altitude Platforms

Wireless sensor network has many applications and very active research area. The coverage span of this network is very important parameter where wide coverage area is a challenge. This paper proposes an architecture for large-scale wireless sensor network (LSWSN) based on satellites and the High-Altitude Platforms (HAP) where the sensor nodes are located on the ground and a wide coverage sink station may be in the form of a satellite or a network of HAPs. A scenario is described for multilayer LSWSN and a study for the system requirements has been established showing the number of Satellites, HAPs and coverage per each sink according to the elevation angle requirements. The Satellite-HAP-Sensor multilayer LSWSN architecture has the feasibility for effective energy and earth coverage and is optimum for covering largely sparse regions.

A Modular Simulation Tool of an Orchestrator for Allocating Virtual Resources in SDN

 Abstract—Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) are technologies for enabling innovative network architectures. Nevertheless, a fundamental problem in instantiation of Virtual Networks (VNs), performed by NFV, is an optimal allocation of resources offered by one or more SDN domain networks. The process of instantiation of VNs is performed in several phases, including splitting and mapping algorithms. For each one of these phases, researchers have developed algorithms, being possible to obtain different results combining them. This paper introduces a modular and flexible graphical discrete event simulation tool for solving the complete virtual resource allocation in SDN domain networks problem. A Java-based tool has been developed to integrate existing and future algorithms related to each phase of the process. The simulator is a test-bed in which researchers can select the appropriate algorithm in each phase and display the results in a graphical form, while obtaining a performance evaluation of the selected and proposed algorithms.

Transport layer enhancements on a satellite‐based mobile broadband system for high‐speed trains

SUMMARYThe great diffusion of wireless portable and handheld devices, along with the growing availability of applications on the Internet, led to a significant increase in the demand of access. Users require to continue business or private activities when moving, with performance at least comparable with that experienced over fixed networks. A very interesting scenario encompasses broadband and uninterrupted access over high‐speed trains. Developments of new telecommunication standards as well as innovative network architectures give the potential to fully match the aforementioned requirements. Nevertheless, there is a significant number of issues, especially related to system integration, mobility management, and propagation channel conditions, that need a careful analysis with the aim to support the design of real systems. This paper deals with this challenging scenario proposing a satellite‐based architecture in which DVB‐S2 and DVB‐RCS standards, MIPv6 at layer 3 (for handover management), and an enhanced TCP version at layer 4, named TCP Noordwijk, allow to achieve good performance. An NS‐2 enhanced simulator has supported the whole analysis. Results show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme against different modulation and coding configurations and compared with a selected set of TCP‐enhanced versions. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Learning Structured Embeddings of Knowledge Bases

Many Knowledge Bases (KBs) are now readily available and encompass colossal quantities of information thanks to either a long-term funding effort (e.g. WordNet, OpenCyc) or a collaborative process (e.g. Freebase, DBpedia). However, each of them is based on a different rigorous symbolic framework which makes it hard to use their data in other systems. It is unfortunate because such rich structured knowledge might lead to a huge leap forward in many other areas of AI like nat- ural language processing (word-sense disambiguation, natural language understanding, ...), vision (scene classification, image semantic annotation, ...) or collaborative filtering. In this paper, we present a learning process based on an innovative neural network architecture designed to embed any of these symbolic representations into a more flexible continuous vector space in which the original knowledge is kept and enhanced. These learnt embeddings would allow data from any KB to be easily used in recent machine learning meth- ods for prediction and information retrieval. We illustrate our method on WordNet and Freebase and also present a way to adapt it to knowledge extraction from raw text.

Real-time, online, air quality monitoring sensor network

Environmental monitoring is an important tool in the overall environmental management strategy. In particular, a planned monitoring strategy can help in quantifying the level of impact that has occurred during country/region development and enables the predictions of potential air pollution changes to be verified. A quantitative assessment of environmental change following industrial activities is important when future environmental liabilities need to be considered. Additionally, environmental monitoring data can enable a better understanding of the processes by which impacts may arise. Traditional environmental monitoring systems are characterized by bulky nodes, expense (in the range of USD 1 million ), and disperse (tens of kilometers) nodal allocation. Traditional systems rely on extrapolating localized measurements to project air quality information over a large geographical area. Therefore, along with the high cost, traditional networks suffer from inaccurate predications/assessment to regional mapping of air quality information, as well as non-flexible gas monitoring and selection. As a result, many research institutes and governmental agencies worldwide are actively involved in research activities for finding more robust and cost-effective alternatives. The underlying technology for those activities is the utilization of wireless sensor networks (WSN). WSN promise to bring low cost, large scale advanced remote monitoring and automated applications to a wide range of technical areas and industries. In addition to lowering capital and operating expenses, WSN provides improved reliability, increased installation flexibility and scalability. The project aims to architect, design, and develop an innovative solution utilizing the WSN. The solution under consideration is ubiquitous and cost effective and provides real-time data transmission and remote/online data processing and accessibility. Innovative, smaller, inexpensive and with different sensing capability, sensor nodes are integral to the solution. Such sensors are emerging, but not yet mature, and therefore substantial effort will be invested in working with sensor vendors to ensure the design and development of the right sensor nodes. The project also includes research activities related to innovative network architecture for robustness and cost effectiveness as well as software development activities for data processing, information presentation and dissemination. This will ensure that localized and personalized information can be delivered to diverse customers.

Integration of 3G Connectivity in PlanetLab Europe

Distributed research testbeds play a fundamental role in the evaluation of disruptive innovations for the Future Internet. In recent years, the main research funding agencies have promoted several initiatives aimed at designing and building open, large scale, realistic experimental facilities that could be used to evaluate innovative networking architectures, paradigms and services. In this paper, after discussing the main challenges in building such infrastructures, we present how, by leveraging the concept of federation, we managed to introduce a first degree of heterogeneity into PlanetLab Europe, a European testbed federated with PlanetLab, by providing UMTS connectivity to PlanetLab Europe nodes. Our contribution is just a first step of an evolutionary path whose further developments will lead to next generation large-scale heterogeneous testbeds for supporting experimentally-driven research on the Network of the Future (Preliminary results within the same framework of this work have been recently published in Canonico et al. (2007) and Botta et al. (2008)).

Measurement-based reconfiguration in optical ring metro networks

Single-hop wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical ring networks operating in packet mode are one of the most promising architectures for the design of innovative metropolitan network (metro) architectures. They permit a cost-effective design, with a good combination of optical and electronic technologies, while supporting features like restoration and reconfiguration that are essential in any metro scenario. In this article, we address the tunability requirements that lead to an effective resource usage and permit reconfiguration in optical WDM metros. We introduce reconfiguration algorithms that, on the basis of traffic measurements, adapt the network configuration to traffic demands to optimize performance. Using a specific network architecture as a reference case, the paper aims at the broader goal of showing which are the advantages fostered by innovative network designs exploiting the features of optical technologies.

RingO: An Experimental WDM Optical Packet Network for Metro Applications

This paper presents Ring Optical Network (RingO), a wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM), ring-based, optical packet network suitable for a high-capacity metro environment. We present three alternative architectural designs and elaborate on the effectiveness of optic with respect to electronic technologies, trying to identify an optimal mix. We present the design and prototyping of a simple but efficient access control protocol, based upon the equivalence of the proposed network architecture with input-buffering packet switches. We discuss the problem of node allocation to WDM channels, which can be viewed as a particular optical network design problem. We, finally, briefly illustrate the fault protection properties of the RingO architecture. The main contribution of this paper is the identification and experimental validation of an innovative optical network architecture, which is feasible and cost effective with technologies available today, and can be a valid alternative to more consolidated solutions in metro applications.

Enabling Gigabit Network Access to End Users

To achieve innovative network architectures capable of delivering high-speed data transfers to end users, considerable efforts have been invested in minimizing or eliminating the bottlenecks that exist in high-speed network environments. These bottlenecks exist primarily at two levels, namely, network data transmission to the end system and data delivery within the end system to the user. For wired networks, improvements in fiber optic technologies have shifted the bottleneck from the underlying physical network to the end system. However, wireless networks still face obstacles at both levels to achieving high, end-to-end performance data delivery, particularly at gigabit per second rates. We first present current wireless communication technologies aimed at delivering gigabit per second transmission rates to end systems. We then investigate the bottleneck at the end system by exploring experimentally the performance benefits of a network interface architecture designed to enable high-performance, low-latency applications using minimal host resources. We compare the performance of our network interface architecture with the traditional one, using commodity PCs connected by gigabit per second local area networks running protocols such as TCP/IP and UDP/IP. We argue that such a network interface architecture can eliminate the bottlenecks prevalent in current end systems and, consequently, enables users to reap the full benefits of the high-speed networks available today.

TeraNet: a multi-gigabits per second ATM network

TeraNet is an experimental network being built at the Center for Telecommunications Research, Columbia University. The network is part of the ACORN (Advanced Communications Organization for Research Network) project. The purpose of ACORN is to investigate innovative optical network architectures which offer user access at data rates as high as one Gigabit per second (Gbit/s). The design principles of TeraNet incorporate three main concepts: a transmission medium that contains multiple channels; a system architecture that employs a multihop approach to routing packets; and a traffic control architecture that supports multiple traffic classes. The network contains a set of network interface units (NIU) that are interconnected with passive optics. Each NIU is a two-by-two switch with an additional user access port. Each of the six NIU ports (three input and three output) can handle data rates up to one Gbit/s. The NIU buffers and the bandwidth of the output links are shared by four traffic classes according to the ATS concept of resource allocation. The packet format and routing procedure are compatible with the emerging ATM standard.