IP Infrastructure Research Articles

Emerging Dimensions Of Copyright Laws: Legal Implications And Futuristic Approach

Intellectual property pertains to the composition of the human intellect. And, the intellectual property right is basically an entitlement of jus in re propria over intangible things. In other words, it is a right over the skills, ideas and intellect of a person. It is fictional in nature and quite different from formal properties. It encompasses copyright, trademarks, service marks, geographical indications, patents, utility models, plant varieties, industrial designs, trade secrets and layout designs, among others. IPR have garnered significance in contemporary times. It has gained importance throughout the whole Nations in recent times. Now, it is no more a subject of law but also a subject of general or public interest. The purpose of enacting laws related to foster the advancement of science, technology, arts, literature and another creative works, while encouraging and rewarding creativity. India is widely recognized for its intellectual progress in fields such as software engineering, missile technology, and space missions, including lunar and interplanetary explorations. Despite these achievements, India lags significantly in engendering intellectual property rights (IPR) fortunes including registered patents, industrial designs, and trademarks. According to a recent report by the US Chamber of Commerce, India positioned 29th out of 30 countries in the global IP survey. This paper is an attempt to highlight the emerging dimensions of copyright laws with special reference to the legal implications and futuristic approach. This concerning scenario highlights the urgent need for the policymakers to strengthen India's IP infrastructure and policies because lack of IPR awareness and protection can lead to the demise of inventions, increased risk of infringement, and economic losses.

Software Defined Networking Architecture for Energy Transaction in Smart Microgrid Systems

A decentralized power distribution network consisting of smart microgrids introduces opportunities to trade with energy called transactive energy. However, research studies in the existing literature suggest that several standardized information models for TE do not meet the network architecture’s reliability, flexibility, and security requirements. This limitation is mainly due to the static nature of traditional IP infrastructure. To achieve these requirements in the network architecture, this study investigates the optimized application of software-defined network architecture for transactive energy in smart microgrid systems. Through literature research, unique design approaches in an SDN architecture are identified that improve the reliability, flexibility, and security of the SDN architecture. These design approaches include a decentralized controller network layout, redundant link configuration, a mesh network topology, and data encryption. The proposed solution uniquely combines these design approaches into a single optimized SDN solution for TESMS. To validate the improvements of the findings from the literature research, each design approach is simulated in this study using Mininet SDN emulator and AnyLogic system simulation software. The proposed solution is then applied to a use-case scenario that shows the improvements required for TESMS. The use-case scenario shows significant improvement in the data path uptime. An improvement of 0.27% is achieved, which equates to a 2 h per month increase in the data path uptime. The results of the simulation show that the proposed SDN architecture improves the reliability and flexibility of a traditional SDN network. Furthermore, enabling encryption between the nodes improves the security of the SDN architecture.

Measuring the Centrality of DNS Infrastructure in the Wild

The centralization of the global DNS ecosystem may accelerate the creation of an oligopoly market, thereby, increasing the risk of a single point of failure and network traffic manipulation. Earlier studies have revealed the level of centralization in terms of the market share of public DNS services and DNS traffic seen by major CDN providers. However, the level of centralization in the infrastructure of the DNS Ecosystem is not well understood. In this paper, we present a novel and lightweight measurement approach that effectively discovers resolver pools from a single probing point. We conduct an Internet-wide active measurement on the client-side as well as the server-side DNS infrastructure to assess the level of DNS centralization in terms of the supporting infrastructure. Our measurement results show that the DNS infrastructure is much more centralized than previously believed. Over 90% of forwarding resolvers are backed by less than 5% (4071) of indirect resolvers. Merely 0.45% (12,679) of all name servers across 1138 gTLDs, operated by just 10 DNS providers, provide authoritative domain resolution service for 48.5% (more than 100 million) of domain names. We also investigated several leading DNS providers in IP infrastructure, load distribution, and service geo-distribution. The findings of our measurements provide novel insights into the centrality of the DNS infrastructure, which will help the Internet community promote the understanding of the DNS ecosystem.

A Multipath Data-Scheduling Strategy Based on Path Correlation for Information-Centric Networking

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has revolutionized the manner of content acquisition by shifting the communication mode from host-centric to information-centric. Considering the existing, large amount of IP infrastructure in current networks, the new ICN architecture is proposed to be compatible with existing networks in order to reduce deployment cost. However, due to compatibility with IP networks, ICN data packets must be transmitted through the default path provided by IP routing regulations, which also limits the transmission efficiency and reliability of ICN. In order to address this issue, this paper introduces a multipath transmission method applied in ICN which takes full advantage of the functions and characteristics of ICN and builds multiple end-to-end relay paths by using the ICN routers as relay nodes. We then propose a relay-node-selection algorithm based on path correlation to minimize the impact of overlapping links. Moreover, we comprehensively calculate the path state value by combining the round-trip time and packet loss rate and propose a multipath data-scheduling algorithm based on the path state value. Simulation experiments show that the proposed method can maintain high bandwidth utilization while reducing the number of out-of-order packets.

A Novel Multipath Transmission Scheme for Information-Centric Networking

Due to the overload of IP semantics, the traditional TCP/IP network has a number of problems in scalability, mobility, and security. In this context, information-centric networking (ICN) is proposed to solve these problems. To reduce the cost of deployment and smoothly evolve, the ICN architecture needs to be compatible with existing IP infrastructure. However, the rigid underlying IP routing regulation limits the data transmission efficiency of ICN. In this paper, we propose a novel multipath transmission scheme by utilizing the characteristics and functions of ICN to enhance data transmission. The process of multipath transmission can be regarded as a service, and a multipath transmission service ID (MPSID) is assigned. By using the ICN routers bound to the MPSID as relay nodes, multiple parallel paths between the data source and the receiver are constructed. Moreover, we design a path management mechanism, including path selection and path switching. It can determine the initial path based on historical transmission information and switch to other optimal paths according to the congestion degree during transmission. The experimental results show that our proposed method can improve the average throughput and reduce the average flow completion time and the average chunk completion time.

Optimized Camera Integration in IP-Based Workflows and Infrastructures

The increasing availability of powerful IP infrastructures opens up new application possibilities for system cameras in media and entertainment applications. Additional IP interfaces on camera base stations have enabled initial applications to be covered and experience to be gained in the first step. However, the question arises as to how the integration of cameras in IP infrastructures can be optimized in such a way that an improved workflow can be achieved for almost all use cases. This includes the possibility of adapting the bandwidth requirements of the cameras to the existing IP bandwidths, but also the possibility to do this without external conversion of the video signals to IP signals. This article will highlight the various challenges and present possible solutions based on camera systems with fully integrated IP connectivity.

Deep Reinforcement Learning Based Routing in IP Media Broadcast Networks: Feasibility and Performance

The Media Broadcast industry has evolved from Serial Digital Interface (SDI) based infrastructures to IP networks. While IP based video broadcast is well established in the data plane, the use of IP networks to transport media flows still poses challenges in terms of resource management and orchestration. SDN based orchestration architectures have emerged in the industry that use SDN to route the media flows of a broadcast service across the provider IP network. Several approaches to multimedia flow routing in IP based SDN networks have been proposed in the context of streaming applications over the Internet. These range from model based linear optimization solutions that have high complexity to simple shortest path based routing heuristics with either static or dynamic link costs. More recently model-free optimization methods such as Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) have been proposed for routing and Traffic Engineering of multimedia flows in SDN networks. The media broadcast scenario however has specific requirements, with services like Master Control Room operation and Live broadcasting of events, and it has been rarely addressed in the literature. In this work we propose a DRL based routing method for this scenario and compare it to static and dynamic link cost algorithms based on Dijkstra shortest paths. This is to our knowledge the first work to follow this approach in the context of Media Broadcast services in IP infrastructures. The algorithm is designed considering the specifications and capabilities of one of the leading SDN orchestrators in the market and considers the more common Service Level Agreement requirements in the industry. Three different DRL algorithms are implemented and compared and we evaluate them using a real service provider network topology. The results indicate that DRL based routing is applicable in real production scenarios and that it achieves considerable performance gains when compared to the static and dynamic link cost shortest path algorithms commonly used today.

A Quadtree-based synchronization protocol for inter-server game state synchronization

Online games are a fundamental part of the entertainment industry but the current IP infrastructure does not satisfactorily fulfill the needs of these services. The novel networking architecture Named Data Networking (NDN) inherently supports network-level multicast and packet-level security and thereby introduces promising features for online games. In this paper, we propose an NDN-based approach to synchronize game state in a server cluster, a task necessary to allow multiple players in large numbers to play in the same game world. The proposed Quadtree Synchronization Protocol applies NDN’s data-centric nature to decouple the game world from the game servers hosting it. This means that requesting changes of a specific game world region becomes possible without knowing which game server is responsible for the requested region. We use a hierarchic game world structure when requesting data that allows the network to forward requests to the responsible game server without directly addressing it. This region-based naming scheme decouples world regions from servers which eases the management of the game server cluster and allows easier recovery after server failures. In addition, this decoupling allows exchanging information about a geographical region, such as a game world, without knowledge of the other participants changing the world. Such a region-based synchronization mode is not possible to implement with existing protocols. However, it allows building distributed systems that do not require a central server to work. Besides architectural benefits, network emulations show that our protocol increases the efficiency of data transport by utilizing network-level multicast. Our proposed approach can keep up with current protocols which can be used for inter-server game state synchronization.

Local P2P group (LPG) communication in structured mobile P2P networks

With the onset of the digital era and the availability of the internet, the need for digital data in a huge manner can be fulfilled by peer-to-peer (P2P) network instead of a traditional client server-based solution. Generally, mobile communication is based on cellular networks or multi-hop wireless networks. Cellular networks have adequate fixed infrastructure whereas multi-hop wireless networks have limited infrastructure and hence there are many limitations. The P2P systems are mainly designed for wired networks and the routing is based on IP infrastructure. Chord based protocols are widely deployed in the structured P2P networks but it can not perform well when implemented for mobile P2P networks due to the mobility of the users. Mobility pattern of mobile users plays an important role in locating users and delivering data packets seamlessly. Today, many of the mobile users follow a fixed mobility pattern in urban cities and mobility pattern of the mobile users can be utilized to reduce table update cost and increase Lookup Success Rate (LSR). We have proposed Local P2P Group (LPG) based communication scheme for structured mobile P2P networks. We are focussed on the mobility pattern of the mobile users in urban cities. We have analytically evaluated the proposed scheme using fluid-flow and RWP (Random Waypoint) mobility models and found that the proposed scheme performs better than the existing schemes like MR-Chord and MobiStore. Our proposed scheme has up to 40% higher Lookup Success Rate and 81% less table update cost than existing schemes, MR-Chord and MobiStore.

Using RIPE Atlas for Geolocating IP Infrastructure

The vast majority of studies on IP geolocation focuses on localizing the end-users, and little attention has been devoted to localizing the elements of the Internet infrastructure, i.e., the routers and servers that make the Internet work. In this paper, we study the maximum theoretical accuracy that can be achieved by a geolocation approach aimed at geolocating the Internet infrastructure. In particular, we study the effects on localization accuracy produced by the position of landmarks and by the strategy followed for their enrollment. We compare two main approaches: the first is more centralized and controlled, and uses well-connected machines belonging to the infrastructure as landmarks; the second is more distributed and scalable and is based on landmarks positioned at the edge of the network. The study is based on an extensive set of measurements collected using the RIPE Atlas platform. The results show that the uniform and widespread diffusion of landmarks can be as important as their measurement accuracy. The study is carried out at both the worldwide and regional scale, including regions that were scarcely observed in the past. The results highlight that the geographical characteristics of the Internet paths are dependent on the considered region, thus suggesting the use of specifically calibrated models. Finally, the study shows that geolocating IP infrastructure with active measurements is feasible in terms of precision and scalability of the overall system.

A controller-based architecture for information centric network construction and topology management

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has recently emerged as a result of the increased demand to access contents regardless of their location in the network services. This new approach facilitates content distribution as a service of the network with lower delay and higher security in comparison with the current IP network. Applying ICN in current IP infrastructure leads to major complexities. One approach to deploy ICN with less complexity is to integrate ICN with Software Defined Networking (SDN). The SDN controller manages the content distribution, caching, and routing based on the users' requests. In this paper, we extend these context by addressing the ICN topology management problem over the SDN network to achieve an improved user experience as well as network performance. In particular, a centralized controller is designed to construct and manage the ICN overlay. Experimental results indicate that this adopted topology management strategy achieves high performance, in terms of low failure in interest satisfaction and reduced download time compared to a plain ICN.

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.

Efficient Next Generation Emergency Communications over Multi-Access Edge Computing

Traditionally, emergency communications between citizens and public authorities relied on legacy telecommunication technologies unable to cope with the agile, rich-media-content communications that mobile users are already using. This is due to the lack of harmonization and interoperable IP-based networking solutions. With the operators currently migrating to broadband IP infrastructures, emergency systems also need to follow this path and adapt their emergency communication platforms to fulfill next generation emergency services regulatory requirements. This becomes even more evident in light of the forthcoming 5G networks, which are envisioned to support an amalgam of diverse applications and services with heterogeneous performance requirements, including mission-critical IoT communication, massive machine-type communication, and gigabit mobile connectivity. Emergency service operators face an enormous challenge in order to synchronize their model of operation with the 5G paradigm. This article studies the challenges that next generation emergency services need to overcome in order to fulfill the requirements for rich-content, real-time, location-specific communications. The concept for next generation emergency communications as described in the project EMYNOS is presented, along with a vision of how this concept can fulfill the 5G requirements for ultra-reliable and ultra-low-latency emergency communications.

A Survey over Mechanisms for Reducing Free Riding Behaviour in Structured P2P Networks

P2P (peer-to-peer) overlays have attracted many researchers due to increase in Internet based P2P applications. A P2P overlay is a distributed system in which the independent nodes participate at their will to share resources in distributed manner. P2P overlays are designed for wired based communication systems but today P2P applications are becoming popular in wireless networks even in multi-hop wireless networks. Routing mechanism in P2P overlays is based on IP infrastructure and many protocols are deployed successfully for efficient and fair P2P applications. However, there are many challenges in designing and deployment of efficient and fair protocols for the P2P overlays. These overlays suffer from many challenges such as dynamic overlay management, lack of robust trust model, counterfeit content distribution, free riding, poor resource search scalability, security, etc. The churn rate of nodes (join and leave of nodes) in the P2P overlay makes overlay management and resource searching more challenging. The free riding nature of the nodes in a P2P overlay is undesirable and it creates unfairness in the P2P overlay. There are several mechanisms proposed such as Eigen Trust model, tit-for-tat policy, point-based incentive policy, Page Rank policy, layered taxation, advertisement of incentive, etc. for encouraging fairness in the P2P overlays. I have presented in-depth survey over free riding behaviour, its effect, and existing mechanisms to reduce free riding in structured P2P overlays.

Secure Inter-Cloud architecture for virtual cloud computing based on hybrid IP and MPLS infrastructure solution

The Next Generation Networks use MPLS protocol in the core network to provide new services that are based on MPLS IP Cloud. This article describes an evaluation of key aspects for the construction of security on MPLS IP Inter-Cloud. The aspects to be evaluated are: separation of traffic between users of MPLS Inter-Cloud, connectivity among sites of the same Cloud application, protection of core of the cloud provider and possibility of using the same plan addresses by users, provided that they are in different MPLS IP Cloud. To achieve this goal it was proposed an architecture for assessment test.

On effective virtual networks interconnection

The network services today require extremely agile and mobile, however, the traditional IP infrastructures are so rigid that cannot fit services well. A way should be put forward to automate the network to improve responsiveness to change. SDN and network virtualization (NV) are two hottest approaches to make networking more automated and scalable to support virtualized and cloud environments. Network virtualization combines hardware and software network resources and network functionality into a single virtual network. SDN is created to simplify traffic management and achieve operational efficiencies by establish and exercising central control over packet forwarding. In this paper, we focus on the situation where SDN controller needs to connect two virtual networks temporarily. We put forward three algorithms to try to make this connection more effective and evaluate these three algorithms.

Alleviating the topology mismatch problem in distributed overlay networks: A survey

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems have enjoyed immense attention and have been widely deployed on the Internet for well over a decade. They are often implemented via an overlay network abstraction atop the Internet’s best-effort IP infrastructure. P2P systems support a plethora of desirable features to distributed applications including anonymity, high availability, robustness, load balancing, quality of service and scalability to name just a few. Unfortunately, inherent weaknesses of early deployments of P2P systems, prevented applications from leveraging the full potential of the paradigm. One major weakness, identified early on, is the topology mismatch problembetween the overlay network and the underlying IP topology. This mismatch can impose an extraordinary amount of unnecessary stress on network resources and can adversely affect both the scalability and efficiency of the operating applications. In this paper, we survey over a decade’s worth of research efforts aimed at alleviating the topology mismatch problem in both structured and unstructured P2P systems. We provide a fine-grained categorization of the suggested solutions by discussing their novelty, advantages and weaknesses. Finally, we offer an analysis as well as pictorial comparisons of the reviewed approaches since we aim to offer a comprehensive reference for developers, system architects and researchers in the field.

Standards for Evolving Media Workflows [Message from the Standards Vice President

As I write this, I am in Geneva for our quarterly Standards Meetings, having just attended IBC 2014 in Amsterdam. During the past five days at the IBC, it was very obvious in both the conference sessions and in the exhibit halls that new technologies are pushing the envelope for content producers and distributors. There are far too many technologies showcased at IBC to highlight, however I would like to draw attention to two areas that directly affect SMPTE standards. The first is the move toward IP infrastructure, and the second the move toward Ultra High Definition TV.

Scalability of information centric networking using mediated topology management

Information centric networking is a new concept that places emphasis on the information items themselves rather than on where the information items are stored. Consequently, routing decisions can be made based on the information items rather than on simply destination addresses. There are a number of models proposed for information centric networking and it is important that these models are investigated for their scalability if we are to move from early prototypes towards proposing that these models are used for networks operating at the scale of the current Internet. This paper investigates the scalability of an ICN system that uses mediation between information providers and information consumers using a publish/subscribe delivery mechanism. The scalability is investigated by extrapolating current IP traffic models for a typical national-scale network provider in the UK to estimate mediation workload. The investigation demonstrates that the mediation workload for route determination is on a scale that is comparable to, or less than, that of current IP routing while using a forwarding mechanism with considerably smaller tables than current IP routing tables. Additionally, the work shows that this can be achieved using a security mechanism that mitigates against maliciously injected packets thus stopping attacks such as denial of service that is common with the current IP infrastructure.

Obscuring users' identity in VoIP/IMS environments

Next Generation Networks bring together wired and wireless architectures, under the umbrella of an all IP architecture. Architectures such as the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) offer advanced services at very low cost but also inherit IP infrastructure's security and privacy issues. The utilized signalling protocol (i.e. Session Initiation Protocol) and the related specifications are both overlooking users' privacy, leaving public and private identities unprotected to eavesdroppers. Existing solutions require either the existence of a public key infrastructure or the establishment of the appropriate mechanism for managing symmetric keys.We propose a novel one-time identity mechanism for obscuring users' real identity against eavesdroppers. The solution exploits the advantages of commutative functions, enabling the communicating parties to exchange data without pre-established keys nor any modification in the infrastructure. All participating entities generate one-time random identities providing in this way unlinkability and anonymity services as well.We evaluate the proposed mechanism through an open source IMS platform. Results have provided evidence that the client's response times are not considerably affected by the proposed mechanism, while the overhead imposed to the IMS core is negligible.