Intra-domain Routing Research Articles

A new intelligent cross-domain routing method in SDN based on a proposed multiagent reinforcement learning algorithm

PurposeA cross-domain intelligent software-defined network (SDN) routing method based on a proposed multiagent deep reinforcement learning (MDRL) method is developed.Design/methodology/approachFirst, the network is divided into multiple subdomains managed by multiple local controllers, and the state information of each subdomain is flexibly obtained by the designed SDN multithreaded network measurement mechanism. Then, a cooperative communication module is designed to realize message transmission and message synchronization between the root and local controllers, and socket technology is used to ensure the reliability and stability of message transmission between multiple controllers to acquire global network state information in real time. Finally, after the optimal intradomain and interdomain routing paths are adaptively generated by the agents in the root and local controllers, a network traffic state prediction mechanism is designed to improve awareness of the cross-domain intelligent routing method and enable the generation of the optimal routing paths in the global network in real time.FindingsExperimental results show that the proposed cross-domain intelligent routing method can significantly improve the network throughput and reduce the network delay and packet loss rate compared to those of the Dijkstra and open shortest path first (OSPF) routing methods.Originality/valueMessage transmission and message synchronization for multicontroller interdomain routing in SDN have long adaptation times and slow convergence speeds, coupled with the shortcomings of traditional interdomain routing methods, such as cumbersome configuration and inflexible acquisition of network state information. These drawbacks make it difficult to obtain global state information about the network, and the optimal routing decision cannot be made in real time, affecting network performance. This paper proposes a cross-domain intelligent SDN routing method based on a proposed MDRL method. First, the network is divided into multiple subdomains managed by multiple local controllers, and the state information of each subdomain is flexibly obtained by the designed SDN multithreaded network measurement mechanism. Then, a cooperative communication module is designed to realize message transmission and message synchronization between root and local controllers, and socket technology is used to ensure the reliability and stability of message transmission between multiple controllers to realize the real-time acquisition of global network state information. Finally, after the optimal intradomain and interdomain routing paths are adaptively generated by the agents in the root and local controllers, a prediction mechanism for the network traffic state is designed to improve awareness of the cross-domain intelligent routing method and enable the generation of the optimal routing paths in the global network in real time. Experimental results show that the proposed cross-domain intelligent routing method can significantly improve the network throughput and reduce the network delay and packet loss rate compared to those of the Dijkstra and OSPF routing methods.

Implementation of Blockchain-Assisted Source Routing for Traffic Management in Software-Defined Networks

The control and infrastructure layers are split into Software-Defined Networks (SDNs). With the control and infrastructure planes split, new network applications may be developed with more simplicity and greater independence. On the other hand, the disadvantages of SDN create a slew of questions. In large-scale networks, such as Wide Area Networks (WANs) covering huge areas, more propagation delays substantially contribute to network convergence time. In addition, traditional SDN restricts network design flexibility due to the influence of controller location on network performance in large-scale networks. SDN-based source routing (SR) has emerged as a viable solution to the issues above, where the packet header field is used to specify a packet's route. This study presents an SR-based End-to-End (E2E) traffic management framework called SoRBlock. In SoRBlock, inter-domain routing uses blockchain technology, while intra-domain routing relies on the SR technique in SDNs. The simulation results show that the proposed SR-based SoRBlock framework outperforms the traditional hierarchical routing approach, HRA, in SDN networks by lowering path setup time (PST) and the number of controller messages. While the same (i.e., identical origin and target) service requests were used for all runs in the simulations, the proposed SoRBlock architecture presents almost three times less total PST between 45ms and 65ms than the HRA method between 130ms and 200ms due to the HRA approach's increased node-controller and controller-controller latencies. On the other hand, SoRBlock shows two times less PST ([75ms – 90ms]) than HRA ([150ms – 175ms]) when different service requests (i.e., different origin and target) were used. Concerning Controller Messages Processed (CMP), the HRA deals nearly 50% more controller messages between 7 and 15 than the SoRBlock between 3 and 10 when the number of domains varies, while the CMP in the SoRBlock scheme ([10 - 17]) approaches that in the HRA framework ([15 - 20]) regarding the ratio while the count of nodes rises in domains.

LRVP: Lightweight Real-Time Verification of Intradomain Forwarding Paths

The correctness of user traffic forwarding paths is an important goal of trusted transmission. Many network security issues are related to it, i.e., denial-of-service attacks, route hijacking, etc. The current path-aware network architecture can effectively overcome this issue through path verification. At present, the main problems of path verification are high communication and high computation overhead. To this aim, this article proposes a lightweight real-time verification mechanism of intradomain forwarding paths in autonomous systems to achieve a path verification architecture with no communication overhead and low computing overhead. The problem situation is that a packet finally reaches the destination, but its forwarding path is inconsistent with the expected path. The expected path refers to the packet forwarding path determined by the interior gateway protocols. If the actual forwarding path is different from the expected one, it is regarded as an incorrect forwarding path. This article focuses on the most typical intradomain routing environment. A few routers are set as the verification routers to block the traffic with incorrect forwarding paths and raise alerts. Experiments prove that this article effectively solves the problem of path verification and the problem of high communication and computing overhead.

A comprehensive multi-topology minimum set cover link-state routing approach for emerging random all-IP access network topologies

Wireless access networks are ever-changing their setup, topologies and provisions of coverage. Forthcoming deployment trends include densification of cells and convergence of the ‘native IP’ with cellular access networks with more than best-effort expectations. Greater meshing in networks due to practical deployment requirements is inevitable and needed. This paper proposes a routing protocol to address the “randomness” of topology interconnections, routing paths and sizes in emerging IP access networks. Termed as Minimum Set Cover (MSC) approach, it is a generalization of the NP and NP complete mathematical problem. The offline component of the MSC multiplies intra-domain routing installations, called Routing Planes (RPs) modelled as graphs, to suitably cover the whole routing topology prior to the traffic injections in the online component. We introduce novel offline optimization features using a dynamic cost function that plans availability of capacities and correlation of routing paths via the chosen set of RPs. Our simulations verify effective path diversity using MSC with its modest protocol overhead and a heuristic used for RPs selection. For randomly constructed access network topologies with 7, 18 and 33 routers and various meshing levels, our results show convincing suitability and key performances gains compared with rival routing solutions.

Preventing DDoS Flooding Attacks With Cryptographic Path Identifiers in Future Internet

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) flooding attacks are very harmful and difficult to prevent due to the default-on nature of both inter-domain and intra-domain routing adopted by the current Internet. Accordingly, many future Internet initiatives try to eliminate DDoS attacks by design. Among these efforts, using path identifiers (PIDs) as inter-domain routing objects has attracted much research interest. However, existing approaches either advertise PIDs throughout the Internet or use secret but forgeable (whether static or dynamic) PIDs, which makes it easy to launch DDoS flooding attacks. To address this issue, in this paper we propose K-PID that uses cryptographic (thus unforgeable) PIDs as inter-domain routing objects. In particular, an <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${N}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -bit PID is comprised of an <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${n}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -bit prefix and ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${N}\,\,-\,\,{n}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ) bits that are cryptographic hash over per-flow/request information and a secret number. The prefix is used for inter-domain packet forwarding and the cryptographic hash is used as a token for allowing a data packet to enter into (or, pass through) a domain. We analyze K-PID’s performance in preventing DDoS flooding attacks and implement K-PID in a prototype to verify K-PID’s feasibility. The results show that K-PID can effectively prevent DDoS flooding attacks at a low cost of reducing the forwarding capability of routers.

A Comparative Study of Routing Protocols for Minimum Path Cost Matric in MANETS

The Routing is the process of transmitting data packets from one node to another another node from source to destination The Mobile Adhoc Networks (MANETs ) doesn't have any fixed network structure or any centralized process to administer. The selection of the route is important for performance of packet transfer from source to destination. These routing protocol are classified as inter domain routing and Intra domain routing protocol. The routing protocols have been classified into Non Reactive , Reactive and Hybrid protocols. In the present paper we proposes to compare reactive routing protocols videlicet Ad hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV), Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocols, Temporarily Ordered Routing Algorithm (TORA) and Associativity Grounded Routing (ABR) protocol.The Routing in MANETs is a one of the robustly and demanding task and has entered a great quantum of mindfulness from experimenters around the globe. To overcome this problem, a colorful number of routing classes have been introduced and the number is still rising day by day fastly. It's relatively hard to decide which protocols or routing classes may do well under an quantum of different network scripts similar as network volume and network topology etc. The study and performance of the above mentioned protocol has also been tabulated in the present two tables . The protocols are based on minimum power and temporary configuration of topology. The table 1 gives comparison of the main characteristics of routing protocols and Table2. provide comparison of various reactive routing protocol.

Efficient Routing Protection Algorithm Based on Optimized Network Topology

Network failures are unavoidable and occur frequently. When the network fails, intra-domain routing protocols deploying on the Internet need to undergo a long convergence process. During this period, a large number of messages are discarded, which results in a decline in the user experience and severely affects the quality of service of Internet Service Providers (ISP). Therefore, improving the availability of intra-domain routing is a trending research question to be solved. Industry usually employs routing protection algorithms to improve intra-domain routing availability. However, existing routing protection schemes compute as many backup paths as possible to reduce message loss due to network failures, which increases the cost of the network and impedes the methods deployed in practice. To address the issues, this study proposes an efficient routing protection algorithm based on optimized network topology (ERPBONT). ERPBONT adopts the optimized network topology to calculate a backup path with the minimum path coincidence degree with the shortest path for all source purposes. Firstly, the backup path with the minimum path coincidence with the shortest path is described as an integer programming problem. Then the simulated annealing algorithm ERPBONT is used to find the optimal solution. Finally, the algorithm is tested on the simulated topology and the real topology. The experimental results show that ERPBONT effectively reduces the path coincidence between the shortest path and the backup path, and significantly improves the routing availability.

A comparison of multi-objective optimization algorithms for weight setting problems in traffic engineering

Traffic engineering approaches are increasingly important in network management to allow an optimized configuration and resource allocation. In link-state routing, setting appropriate weights to the links is an important and challenging optimization task. Different approaches have been put forward towards this aim, including evolutionary algorithms (EAs). This work addresses the evaluation of a single and two multi-objective EAs, in two tasks related to weight setting optimization towards optimal intra-domain routing, knowing the network topology and aggregated traffic demands and seeking to minimize network congestion. In both tasks, the optimization considers scenarios where there is a dynamic alteration in the network, with (1) changes in the traffic demand matrices, and (2) link failures. The methods will simultaneously optimize for both conditions, the normal and the altered one, following a preventive TE approach. Since this leads to a bi-objective function, the use of multi-objective EAs, such as SPEA2 and NSGA-II, came naturally; those are compared to a single-objective EA previously proposed by the authors. The results show a remarkable performance and scalability of NSGA-II in the proposed tasks presenting itself as the most promising option for TE.

A walkthrough of name data networking: Architecture, functionalities, operations and open issues

Name data networking (NDN) is one of the proposed ICN based future Internet architecture aims to substitute our current TCP/IP based Internet. The recent advancements in technology reduced the cost to connect to the Internet and made it feasible to connect a wide variety of devices that leads to rapid growth in hand-held devices and exponentially increased Internet users. The Internet usage pattern has also changed dramatically in the last decade and a considerable proportion of Internet traffic consists of video files only. TCP/IP based Internet was designed to communicate between point to point entities and mobility, multicast support, security, and a tremendous amount of Internet traffic was not considered at that time. The mismatch between Internet usage requirements and current Internet architecture motivated researchers to come up with content based new sustainable Internet architecture. NDN is designed from a clean slate and supposed to overcome the shortcomings while leverage strength present in TCP/IP based Internet architecture. NDN is a request-driven architecture where users request for content using names without concern about host. This article presents a detailed survey on NDN architecture, protocols, and previously proposed strategies. It also offers a comparative study on proposed strategies for naming, content caching, inter and intradomain routing, forwarding, and security. This survey uses a bottom-up approach and a new taxonomy for comparative analysis and assessment to present insights about the differences between the existing strategies and protocols proposed for NDN. The survey also explored the present applications and ongoing research and suggests future research directions.

A Learning-Based Approach to Intra-Domain QoS Routing

In traditional networks, routing table is essential for packet transmission due to the lack of the direction information about destination in the head of packet. However, it is feasible to make the address of device encode the routing information with the application of data technology. In this article, we propose new identities for networking routers -vectors, and a new routing principle based on these vectors is designed accordingly. These vectors encode the device distance information and serve as a pattern of the network topology. Then, routing decisions could be made by these vector calculations and only requirement of table query on the destination vector following the proposed routing principle. The proposed method is not limited in calculating the shortest path routing, but extend to solve the constrain routing problem. Besides, multi-paths routing is also available as long as multi-paths exist between the origin-destination pairs. The simulation results show that our proposed method works reliable and stable in routing tasks, and can achieve a remarkable performance when compared with the state-of-the-art work on the delay constrained least cost path (DCLC) problem.

A hybrid link protection scheme for ensuring network service availability in link-state routing networks

The internet is playing an increasingly crucial role in both personal and business activities. In addition, with the emergence of real-time, delay sensitive and mission-critical applications, stringent network availability requirement is put forward for internet service providers (ISPs). However, commonly deployed intradomain link-state routing protocols react to link failures by globally exchanging link state advertisements and recalculating routing table, inevitably causing significant forwarding discontinuity after a failure. Therefore, the loop-free criterion (LFC) approach has been widely deployed by many ISPs for coping with the single network component failure scenario in large internet backbones. The success of LFC lies in its inherent simplicity, but this comes at the expense of letting certain failure scenarios go unprotected. To achieve full failure coverage with LFC without incurring significant extra overhead, we propose a novel link protection scheme, hybrid link protection (HLP), to achieve failure resilient routing. Compared to previous schemes, HLP ensures high network availability in a more efficient way. HLP is implemented in two stages. Stage one provides an efficient LFC based method (MNP-e). The complexity of the algorithm is less than that of Dijkstra's algorithm and can provide the similar network availability with LFC. Stage two provides backup path protection (BPP) based on MNP-e, where only a minimum number of links need to be protected, using special paths and packet headers, to meet the network availability requirement. We evaluate these algorithms in a wide spread of relevant topologies, both real and synthetic, and the results reveal that HLP can achieve high network availability without introducing conspicuous overhead. HLP not only needs around 10% time of that of full protection, but also provides full protection capabilities that full protection provide.

Identifying OSPF LSA falsification attacks through non-linear analysis

Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) is one of the most widely used intra-domain routing protocols. Unfortunately, it has many serious security issues. Falsification over OSPF is one of the most critical vulnerabilities that can cause routing loops and a black hole. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach by using a technique from non-linear statistical analysis to identify OSPF attacks. Firstly, we evaluate the capability of the non-linear technique to identify OSPF attacks using a controlled testbed where we introduce different types of LSA falsifications. Secondly, we evaluate our approach to detect different types of OSPF attacks using OSPF traffic associated with a single OSPF router and OSPF traffic associated with a set of OSPF routers. In both cases, our approach can detect anomalous behaviour quickly. Finally, we use various successful machine learning classifiers to analyze the outputs obtained from the non-linear analysis and calibrate their suitability in discovering such anomalies.

Congestion avoidance transmission mechanism based on two-dimensional forwarding

In the existing intra-domain routing mechanism, IP packets are transmitted along the shortest path, which frequently leads to congestion of some key links or make some links in danger of congestion (dangerous link). Multipath transmission mechanisms are often adopted to settle such problem, but they have disadvantages such as extra packet field and lack of real-time response. In this paper, the Congestion Avoidance transmission mechanism based on Two-Dimensional routing (CATD) is proposed. When congestion is about to occur in a link, a congestion avoidance path (CA-Path) is constructed based on two-dimensional forwarding to bypass part of the traffic of this link to other paths. We also put forward the optimal scheme of CA-Path, which avoids redundant transmission and reduces the deployment of two-dimensional entries. Furthermore, in order to minimize the number of two-dimensional entries, we propose the selection rules of congestion avoidance flow (CA-Flow). The congestion avoidance based on two-dimensional routing has four advantages that: it can divide all the traffic more meticulously based on their sources and destinations, it avoids conflict with previous one-dimensional forwarding, it brings no extra field in packet, and it will not lead to subsequent link congestion because of the deployment of SDN (Software Defined Network) server. Based on actual network and global typical topology, our experiments show that CATD realizes congestion avoidance rapidly and enhances the bandwidth utilization of the whole network, and the CA-Path is shorter than that of the other mechanism.

Reliability-Based Cluster Head Selection Methodology Using Fuzzy Logic for Performance Improvement in WSNs

Prolonging the network lifetime is one of the vital challenges in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Typically, the lifespan of WSNs can be increased by a technique called clustering, which plays a significant role in simplifying intra-domain routing. The clustering method accounts only a small number of nodes, which are randomly selected as cluster heads (CHs). The main responsibility of CHs is to receive collected data or information from its member nodes and to aggregate the received data and convey the received data to the sink (Sk) or base station (BSn). In this paper, we have proposed a method namely “reliability-based enhanced technique for the ordering of preference by similarity ideal solution (RE-TOPSIS)” combining with fuzzy logic which uses multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) approach aiding in the effective and reliable selection of CHs. It also uses the conventional LEACH protocol to enable one-time CH selection or scheduling in each cluster based on RE-TOPSIS rank index value. This process completely eliminates the need of CH selection process in each round of LEACH’s setup state cycle. We have accounted for various criteria such as 1) residual energy; 2) distances between adjacent nodes; 3) energy utilization rates; 4) availability of neighboring nodes; 5) distances between the sink and CHs as well as distances between CHs to member nodes; and 6) the reliability index for completely devising the new scheme. The simulations are accomplished to assess or suggest the performances of the proposed RE-TOPSIS and to compare its performances with the performances of the existing protocols. The results show that the proposed scheme enhances the network lifespan, conserves energy, and introduces a considerable reduction in the frequency of CH selection per cycle by about 20%–25% as compared with the contemporary fuzzy-TOPSIS and LEACH protocols and finally the metrics of the proposed RE-TOPSIS are highlighted.

SDN Based End-to-End Inter-Domain Routing Mechanism for Mobility Management and Its Evaluation.

Nowadays, due to the widespread usage of mobile devices and wireless network technologies, we can use various ICT services almost anytime, anywhere even if we are changing our location at that moment. Therefore, mobility management technology have been attracting attention. This technology is to keep communication alive even when a mobile node (MN), which is communicating with the server or some nodes, moves to another network domain. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is used for mobility management to realize effective intra-domain routing that optimizes routes when an MN moves inside an SDN domain. However, many of the approaches mainly focus on intra-domain routing and it is difficult to optimize inter-domain route. In this paper, we focus on this routing optimization problem and propose an SDN based end-to-end routing mechanism specified for mobility management. The proposed routing mechanism can optimize an end-to-end route based on various parameters such as bandwidth, number of domains, and flow operations for mobility after an MN has moved across SDN domains. We carried out some simulational experimentations to evaluate the effect of proposal. It is shown that the proposed routing mechanism can reduce communication delay and enhance network performance. Thus, the proposed routing mechanism can realize effective ICT services.

A fine-grained multi-source measurement platform correlating routing transitions with packet losses

In this paper, we are interested in the relationship between packet losses and routing changes in an operational network. To do so we designed and deployed DCART, a monitoring platform over RENATER, the French research and education network. Our platform collects four data sources using both active and passive measurements in order to unveil their temporal correlations. Active probing allows especially for measuring packet losses on specifically crafted data flows. Those flows explore several load balanced paths and ease the revelation of forwarding loops. Passive monitoring is achieved by listening to all routing updates from IS-IS, the intra-domain routing protocol in use, and by retrieving tickets generated by the Network Operations Center (NOC).During our monitoring campaign, we observe that most of the series of loss were correlated to routing events either because routing changes lead to inconsistent state transitions, or because faulty – and so lossy – links trigger numerous periods of link flapping. In particular, we show that losses due to forwarding loops resulting from inconsistent routing states are quite common when links come back after an outage. We also show that link flapping sometimes induce very long lasting lossy periods frequently unnoticed by the NOC. A lightweight monitoring platform such as DCART could be used to better anticipate recurrent network outages and to improve the ticketing system.

Analysis of Practical Aspects of Multi-Plane Routing-Based Load Balancing Approach for Future Link-State Convergent All-IP Access Networks

With the expected surge in the global IP traffic, service providers would need to adapt accordingly to operate disruption and loss free networks supported with the developing IP infrastructure. With the disposal of the hierarchical network structure, radio access networks are moving towards a flat-IP architecture and novel topological set-ups in the backhaul. Hence, a routing paradigm that employs suitable Traffic Engineering (TE) techniques aligned with the developing nature of future access networks must be applied. It becomes imminent that the routing considerations for IP access networks converge with the ones found in conventional intra-domain routing. In this paper, Multi-Plane Routing (MPR) that consolidates various aspects in all-IP infrastructure is extensively studied in access network structures. We propose a MPR-based TE approach considering two different scenarios to reflect the evolution in the architectural design of access network structures under a realistic traffic scenario with a varying range of internal/external traffic. Moreover, a new optimization framework for the offline and online TE mechanisms of MPR have been formulated. Accordingly, a practical performance evaluation testing the validity of the aforementioned scenarios is presented. Our simulation results demonstrate extensive analysis in terms of several performance criteria in networks. It is convincingly shown that for ranges of topologies, MPR's utilization of whole topology in building path diversity in networks, allows for significant improvement of networks capacity, performance, and support for meshing.

An Efficient Multipath Routing Algorithm

This paper studies how to employ the incremental shortest path first algorithm to reduce the computational overhead of the DC (Downstream Criterion) implementation, and proposes an efficient Intra-domain routing protection algorithm based on i-SPF (ERPISPF). Theoretical analysis indicates that the time complexity of ERPISPF is less than that of constructing a shortest path tree. The experiment results show that ERPISPF reduce more than 93% computation overhead compared to the DC, and can provide the same protection ratio with DC.

Robust multiobjective optimization with application to Internet routing

Robust optimization addressing decision making under uncertainty has been very well developed for problems with a single objective function and applied to areas of human activity such as portfolio selection, investment decisions, signal processing, and telecommunication-network planning. As these decision problems typically have several decisions or goals, we extend robust single objective optimization to the multiobjective case. The column-wise uncertainty model can be carried over to the multiobjective case without any additional assumptions. For the row-wise uncertainty model, we show under additional assumptions that robust efficient solutions are efficient to specific instance problems and can be found as the efficient solutions of another deterministic problem. Being motivated by the fact that Internet traffic must be maintained in a reliable yet affordable manner in situations of complex and dynamic usage, we apply the row-wise model to an intradomain multiobjective routing problem with polyhedral traffic uncertainty. We consider traditional objective functions corresponding to link utilizations and implement the biobjective case using the parametric simplex algorithm to compute robust efficient routings. We also present computational results for the Abilene network and analyze their meaning in the context of the application.

A Secure Link State Routing Protocol for NDN

The Named-data Link State Routing protocol (NLSR) is a protocol for intra-domain routing in Named Data Networking (NDN). It is an application level protocol similar to many IP routing protocols, but NLSR uses NDN’s interest/data packets to disseminate routing updates, directly benefiting from NDN’s built-in data authenticity. The NLSR design, which was first developed in 2013 and deployed on the NDN test bed in August 2014, has undergone significant changes. Following an application-driven design approach, NLSR’s development helped drive the development of the trust/security functionality of NDN libraries as well as a number of features in NDN’s forwarding daemon and ChronoSync. In this paper, we describe the current design and implementation of NLSR, with emphasis on those features that differentiate it from an IP-based link state routing protocol: 1) naming: a hierarchical naming scheme for routers, keys, and routing updates; 2) security: a hierarchical trust model for routing within a single administrative domain; 3) routing information dissemination: using ChronoSync to disseminate routing updates; and 4) multipath routing: a simple way to calculate and rank multiple forwarding options. Although NLSR is designed in the context of a single domain, its design patterns may offer a useful reference for future development of inter-domain routing protocols.