IP Networks Research Articles

Comparison of Software Defined Networking with Traditional Networking

The Internet has caused the advent of a digital society; wherein almost everything is connected and available from any place. Thus, regardless of their extensive adoption, traditional IP networks are yet complicated and arduous to operate. Therefore, there is difficulty in configuring the network in line with the predefined procedures and responding to the load modifications and faults through network reconfiguring. The current networks are likewise vertically incorporated to make matters far more complicated: the control and data planes are bundled collectively. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging concept which aims to change this situation by breaking vertical incorporation, promoting the logical centralization of the network control, separating the network control logic from the basic switches and routers, and enabling the network programming. The segregation of concerns identified between the policies concept of network, their implementation in hardware switching and data forwarding is essential to the flexibility required: SDN makes it less complicated and facilitates to make and introduce new concepts in networking through breaking the issue of the network control into tractable parts, simplifies the network management and facilitate the development of the network. In this paper, the SDN is reviewed; it introduces SDN, explaining its core concepts, how it varies from traditional networking, and its architecture principles. Furthermore, we presented the crucial advantages and challenges of SDN, focusing on scalability, security, flexibility, and performance. Finally, a brief conclusion of SDN is revised.

Design and implementation of a novel two-phase spectrum handoff scheme for QoS aware mobile users in cognitive radio networks

Quality of Service (QoS) aware spectrum handoff operation is critical for Secondary Users (SUs) executing real-time applications like Voice over IP (VoIP) in Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs). The problem is aggravated by the inclusion of occasionally mobile SUs where pre-selected target channels are often rendered insignificant during handoff under dynamic conditions. Conventional proactive and reactive schemes may underperform due to channel obsolescence issues and unacceptable handoff latency respectively while a combined approach is not yet explored under the constraints of practical applicability. In view of these challenges and enormous significance of VoIP based CRN in 5G networks, this paper proposes a practically feasible two-phase spectrum handoff methodology with I_Phase and S_Phase operating under alternate conditions. I_Phase deploys a three-level dropping decision scheme followed by a two-tier spectrum handoff policy and is motivated by an integrated approach spanning every CR operation. S_Phase incorporates user mobility and application-oriented aspects where channel drop is governed by a joint two-order Hidden Markov Model — custom Damerau–Levenshtein distance metric based policy and spectrum handoff is monitored by a novel non-cooperative TOPSIS method. These phases are assisted by two proposed prerequisite techniques namely ACT (Adaptive Call Transmission) involving CR timing parameters and VER (VoIP Early Resumption) dealing with early call resumption. Comparative analysis of QoS metrics including per-instance handoff latency, transmission duration per target channel, channel drop and call drop probabilities, etc. in analytical and simulation platforms record significant performance improvement. Novelty of this work further relies on design and execution of SU prototype with the proposed scheme in test-bed that successfully provides QoS guarantees during spectrum handoff.

A systematic review on distributed denial of service attack defense mechanisms in programmable networks

SummaryDesign flaws and vulnerabilities inherent to network protocols, devices, and services make Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) a persisting threat in the cyberspace, despite decades of research efforts in the area. The historical vertical integration of traditional IP networks limited the solution space, forcing researchers to tweak network protocols while maintaining global compatibility and proper service to legitimate flows. The advent of Software‐Defined Networking (SDN) and advances in Programmable Data Planes (PDP) changed the state of affairs and brought novel possibilities to deal with such attacks. In summary, the ability of bringing together network intelligence to a control plane, and offloading flow processing tasks to the forwarding plane, opened up interesting opportunities for network security researchers unlike ever. In this article, we dive into recent research that relies on SDN and PDP to detect, mitigate, and prevent DDoS attacks. Our literature review takes into account the SDN layered view as defined in RFC7426 and focuses on the data, control, and application planes. We follow a systematic methodology to capture related articles and organize them into a taxonomy of DDoS defense mechanisms focusing on three facets: activity level, deployment location, and cooperation degree. From the analysis of existing work, we also highlight key research gaps that may foster future research in the field.

Content-oriented Framework for Future Internet

In this paper, we propose a Content-Oriented Framework for future Internet (COFI) to reduce content-oriented communication costs and latency by exploiting advantages of IP networks and CCN. To be compatible with the Internet, COFI maps a name prefix to a global routing prefix and a name to an anycast address. In this way, a content-centric domain identified by a name prefix can also be defined by the mapping global routing prefix, and the content identified by a name can also be specified by the mapping anycast address. Based on the mapping mechanism, the content-oriented communications between IP and CCN are achieved in the unicast way. Moreover, COFI proposes the request pending mechanism so that multiple consumers share desired contents via one communication process. COFI is evaluated, and the data show that COFI reduces content-oriented communication costs and latency.

Efficient mobility management in IP networks through three layered MIPv6

Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) is considered inefficient to support mobility due to larger handover delay and signaling overhead. Therefore, Hierarchical MIPv6 (HMIPv6) is designed by introducing a Mobile Anchor Point (MAP) in the MIPv6 architecture. The MAP considerably drops the handoff delay and signaling load for mobility management in IPv6. The Three Layered MIPv6 (TLMIPv6), the focus of this paper, is influenced by the benefits of placing MAPs for efficient mobility management. In this model, three MAPs are placed in the architecture to reduce signaling cost and handoff latency. These MAPs are placed hierarchically in a tree like architecture, and the movement of nodes is coordinated by different MAP based on nodes’ movement patterns. The behavior of the proposed model is simulated under various traffic scenarios and mobility conditions and compared with MIPv6 and HMIPv6 and Flow Based Distributed Mobility Management (FBDM) protocols. The results depict that when users are less mobile or confined their movements to a small geographical area, the proposed TLMIPv6 outperforms MIPv6, HMIPv6, and FBDM in handoff latency and signaling costs. Some suitable application scenarios for adopting TLMIPv6 are also mentioned at the end of the paper. The future scopes of the work are outlined.

Design of robust programmable networks with bandwidth-optimal failure recovery scheme

More than ever, data networks have demonstrated their central role in the world economy, but also in the well-being of humanity that needs fast and reliable networks. In parallel, with the emergence of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN), efficient network algorithms considered too hard to be put in practice in the past now have a second chance to be considered again. In this context, as new networks will be deployed and current ones get significant upgrades, it is thus time to rethink the network dimensioning problem with protection against failures. In this paper, we consider a path-based protection scheme with the global rerouting strategy in which, for each failure situation, there may be a new routing of all the demands. Our optimization task is to minimize the needed amount of bandwidth. After discussing the hardness of the problem, we develop two scalable mathematical models that we handle using both Column Generation and Benders Decomposition techniques. Through extensive simulations on real-world IP network topologies and on randomly generated instances, we show the effectiveness of our methods: they lead to savings of 40 to 48% of the bandwidth to be installed in a network to protect against failures compared to traditional schemes. Finally, our implementation in OpenDaylight demonstrates the feasibility of the approach. Its evaluation with Mininet shows that our solution provides sub-second recovery times, but the way it is implemented may greatly impact the amount of signaling traffic exchanged. In our evaluations, the recovery phase requires only a few tens of milliseconds for the fastest implementation, compared to a few hundreds of milliseconds for the slowest one.

Research on high security of IP tunnel in virtual private network

IPSec encrypts and authenticates the packets of IP protocol. Both sides of IP network layer communication use encryption authentication, data source authentication and integrity verification to ensure the integrity, confidentiality and anti replay of IP protocol packet transmission. In enterprise network management, we can usually use IPSec VPN technology to establish a secure channel to realize the secure communication between headquarters and branches.[1]

Gateway Placement Optimization in LEO Satellite Networks Based on Traffic Estimation

Using satellite constellations to provide global Internet access services has recently drawn increasing attention. A low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite network with multiple satellites provides global coverage, low latency, and operates independently, by which it effectively complements terrestrial IP networks. Satellite gateways are located on the ground and can serve as data exchange points between satellite networks and the Internet. As the placement scheme can affect network performance, finding appropriate sites for gateways constitutes a fundamental problem. This paper proposes a gateway placement optimization (GPO) method for LEO satellite networks in order to solve this problem by modeling it as a combination optimization problem. We aim to identify the best gateway locations that can balance traffic loads while using as few gateways as possible. The constraints to be satisfied concern the physical links between gateways and satellites: specifically, link interference, satellite bandwidth, and number of satellite antennas. We use a gravity model to estimate the traffic matrix from/to gateways and satellites, then we adopt and modify the discrete particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to solve this problem. Finally, we apply the GPO method to numerical tests on real satellite constellations. The results indicate that our method performs well and effectively.

Contracting VoIP Packet Payload Down to Zero

Abstract The inefficient use of the IP network bandwidth is a fundamental issue that restricts the exponential spreading of Voice over IP (VoIP). The primary reason for this is the big header size of the VoIP packet. In this paper, we propose a method, called Short Voice Frame (SVF), that addresses the big header size of the VoIP packet. The main idea of the SVF method is to make effective use of the VoIP packet header fields that are unneeded to the VoIP technology. In particular, these fields will be used for temporarily buffering the voice frame (VoIP packet payload) data. This will make the VoIP packet payload short or even zero in some cases. The performance evaluation of the proposed SVF method showed that the use of the IP network bandwidth has improved by up to 28.3% when using the G.723.1 codec.

Keamanan Jaringan dengan Cowrie Honeypot dan Snort Inline-Mode sebagai Intrusion Prevention System

Computer network systems have been designing to share resources. Sharing resources process, data security, and confidentiality are main issues in anticipating misuse of the access to information by unauthorized parties. The solution to anticipating these problems is the availability of a security system capable of handling various intruders who threaten the system and protect network resources. This study builds and analyzes the performance of computer network security using cowrie honeypot and snort inline-mode as an Intrusion Prevention System (IPS). The development process goes through the stages of analysis, design, implementation, and monitoring. The content analysis method has been using to explore the problems and requirements of the system built. The security system was build by configuring the IP address and network system devices (server, remote admin, client attacker). The test has been carrying out on 3 test parameters (confidentiality, availability, and integrity), comparison testing method has been using to test the integrity parameters. The test results indicate that the system functionality test for user needs have fulfilled, the results of the confidentiality test (83.3%), availability (93.3%), and the integrity of the inline-mode snort show faster response time (0.069 seconds on average) and more CPU resource usage efficient (0.04% average) than the cowrie honeypot. IPS snort inline-mode overall integrity parameter testing is more recommended for used network security systems than cowrie honeypots.

IPvest: Clustering the IP Traffic of Network Entities Hidden Behind a Single IP Address Using Machine Learning

IP Networks serve a variety of connected network entities (NEs) such as personal computers, servers, mobile devices, virtual machines, hosted containers, etc. The growth in the number of NEs and technical considerations has led to a reality where a single IP address is used by multiple NEs. A typical example is a home router using Network Address Translation (NAT). In organizations and cloud environments, a single IP can be used by multiple virtual machines or containers running on a single device. Discovering the number of NEs served by an IP address and clustering their traffic correctly is of value in many use cases for security, lawful interception, asset management, and other purposes. In this paper, we introduce IPvest, a system that incorporates unsupervised and supervised learning algorithms based on various features for counting and clustering network traffic of NEs masqueraded by a single IP. The features are based on the characteristics of operating systems (OSs), NAT behavior, and users' habits. Our model is evaluated on real-world datasets including Windows, Linux-based, Android, and iOS-based devices, containers, virtual machines, and load-balancers. We show that IPvest can count the number of NEs and cluster their traffic with high precision, even for containers running on a single device and servers behind a load-balancer.

A Proposed Solution for Route Reply Storm Problem to Improve DSR Protocol Performance in Wireless Sensor Networks

Due to the limited transmission range of the wireless sensor network interface, a node may need multiple network hops to exchange data with another node over networks and other issues cause an overhead and bad utilization on the network. As a consequently, if some nodes reply route request at the same time to the same destination, then these simultaneous replies from different nodes will cause collision at the destination which it can cause a problem named route reply storm. The dynamic source routing (DSR) protocol is a reactive source routing protocol for mobile IP network where nodes should sense and discover with nearby nodes. Each node acts as a router for sending and receiving the packets to/from other node. In this work, we present a new proposal as a solution for storm route reply problem in DSR; the objective of the new proposed solution is to present a way to reduce unnecessary packet flooding between source and destination nodes in order to enhance DSR protocol. Afterthought, this work proposed some case studies to verify our proposed solution for solving the problem route reply storm, our verifications proves our robustness and correctness of the proposed solution against two main WSN problems that may face any wireless sensor network including coverage problem and link failure problem. The simulation results achieved here for two routing protocols DSR protocol and proposed improved DSR protocol for energy efficiency parameters. Simulation results showed that the energy consumption of proposed approach is minimized by 25 % approximately as compared to previous standard DSR protocol while the network lifetime performance is increased by approximately 35 % as compared to standard DSR protocol. In summary, the proposed solution of DSR protocol can be energy efficient for wireless sensor networks resource management.

Soft-Mesh: A Robust Routing Architecture for Hybrid SDN and Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are considered self-organizing, self-healing, and self-configuring networks. Despite these exciting features, WMNs face several routing challenges including scalability, reliability and link failures, mobility, flexibility, and other network management issues. To address these challenges, WMNs need to make programmable to allow modifications of standard techniques to be configured and implemented through software programs that can be resolved by integrating Software Defined Networking (SDN) architecture. SDN, being a cutting-edge technology promises the facilitation of network management as well as routing issues of wireless mesh networks. However, the evolution of the legacy IP-based network model in its entirety leads to technical, operational, and economic problems that can be mitigated by full interoperability between SDN and existing IP devices. This study introduces a Robust Routing Architecture for Hybrid Software-Defined and Wireless Mesh Networks (Soft-Mesh), by systematic and gradual transitioning of WMNs to SDNs in an efficient manner. The main objective of this paper is to suggest improvements to the architecture of the SDN node that allow the implementation of various network functions such as routing, load balancing, network control, and traffic engineering for the hybrid SDN and IP networks. Mininet-WiFi Simulator is used to perform various experiments to evaluate the performance of proposed architecture by creating a hybrid network topology with a varying number of nodes that is 50, 100, 150, 200, and 250 including SDN hybrid and legacy nodes with varying proportion of SDN hybrid and legacy nodes. Results are taken for the average UDP throughput, end-to-end delay, packet drop ratio, and routing overhead while comparing with traditional routing protocols including Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) and Better Approach to Mobile Adhoc Networking (BATMAN) and with existing hybrid SDN/IP routing architectures including Hakiri and wmSDN. The analysis of simulation results shows that the proposed architecture Soft-Mesh outperforms in terms of the aforementioned performance metrics than the traditional and exiting hybrid routing protocols. Soft-Mesh gives 50% to 70% improved results concerning the incremental proportion of SDN hybrid nodes.

Multi-indicator Active Queue Management Method

A considerable number of applications are running over IP networks. This increased the contention on the network resource, which ultimately results in congestion. Active queue management (AQM) aims to reduce the serious consequences of network congestion in the router buffer and its negative effects on network performance. AQM methods implement different techniques in accordance with congestion indicators, such as queue length and average queue length. The performance of the network is evaluated using delay, loss, and throughput. The gap between congestion indicators and network performance measurements leads to the decline in network performance. In this study, delay and loss predictions are used as congestion indicators in a novel stochastic approach for AQM. The proposed method estimates the congestion in the router buffer and then uses the indicators to calculate the dropping probability, which is responsible for managing the router buffer. The experimental results, based on two sets of experiments, have shown that the proposed method outperformed the existing benchmark algorithms including RED, ERED and BLUE algorithms. For instance, in the first experiment, the proposed method resides in the third-place in terms of delay when compared to the benchmark algorithms. In addition, the proposed method outperformed the benchmark algorithms in terms of packet loss, packet dropping, and packet retransmission. Overall, the proposed method outperformed the benchmark algorithms because it preserves packet loss while maintaining reasonable queuing delay.

Fuzzy type 1 PID controllers design for TCP/AQM wireless networks

<p><span>The search of FLC_PID controller for TCP/AQM Wireless Networks, to deal with congestion for Internet users and to get good performance and capabilities of TCP / IP networks. Neglect of controlling the network delay and the number of continuous users that leads to a problem in the transmission process. Recently, automatic control units are adapted to solve this problem with the difficulty of controlling congestion in the presence of wireless links. This modest research presents one of the traditional PID controller methods with fuzzy logic so that wireless networks and congestion can be controlled by various configurations. The proposed methods were simulated with the required comparisons in the adoption of nonlinear systems to determine the best performance and it was found that the use of the Fuzzy logic control can achieve the best performance (reducing the delay time of delivering packets and packets loss). The simulation of the current work shows through its results the possibility of controlling the behavior of the system and through testing the balance when changed with time delay through the impact of communication time and its relationship with the stability of the work of the system.</span></p>

CDRA: A Community Detection based Routing Algorithm for Link Failure Recovery in Software Defined Networks

The increase in size and complexity of the Internet has led to the introduction of Software Defined Networking (SDN). SDN is a new networking paradigm that breaks the limitations of traditional IP networks and upgrades the current network infrastructures. However, like traditional IP networks, network failures may also occur in SDN. Multiple research studies have discussed this problem by using a variety of techniques. Among them is the use of the community detection method is one of the failure recovery technique for SDN. However, this technique have not considered the specific problem of multiple link multi-community failure and inter-community link failure scenarios. This paper presents a community detection-based routing algorithm (CDRA) for link failure recovery in SDN. The proposed CDRA scheme is efficient to deal with single link intra-community failure scenarios and multiple link multi-community failure scenarios and is also able to handle the inter-community link failure scenarios in SDN. Extensive simulations are performed to evaluate the performance of the proposed CDRA scheme. The simulation results depicts that the proposed CDRA scheme have better simulations results and reduce average round trip time by 35.73%, avg data packet loss by 1.26% and average end to end delay 49.3% than the Dijkstra based general recovery algorithm and also can be used on a large scale network platform.

Анализ очереди в системе G/G/1 на основе гиперэкспоненциальных распределений

For real-time applications, the change in packet delay, which is usually called delay jitter, is one of the most important parameters of quality of service in modern infocommunication networks when processing multimedia streams, along with the delay and the probability of packet loss. This article discusses approaches to assessing jitter in modern infocommunication networks when processing non-Poissonian traffic in the G/G/1 system. To approximate the system of an arbitrary queue G/G/1, a model based on hyperexponential distributions of the type H2/H2/1 was used. As a processed stream, the implementation of IP network traffic with the absence of mutual correlations between the time intervals between packets and the times of packet processing is used. An important task in this case is to determine the parameters of hyperexponential distributions for the time intervals between packets and packet processing times. The paper presents two methods for determining the parameters of hyperexponential distributions: using the method of moments and using the EM-algorithm. The paper analyzes the influence of the network load factor on the jitter value when using two models for determining the parameters of hyperexponential distributions. This analysis showed a slight increase in jitter with increasing network load both in the case of using the method of moments and in the case of the EM algorithm. It has been determined that the estimates of the jitter values in the case of applying the method of moments and the EM algorithm are quite close in value. The main result of the work is to obtain simple calculation formulas for the analysis of jitter in the G/G/1 system using hyperexponential distributions.

Study of the impact of the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 based on the tunneling mechanism in mobile networks

Nowadays, it has become necessary to be able to be reachable at any place on the planet, and at any time "Any where, Any time, Any place". While the current version of Internet Protocol 4 (IPv4) cannot provide a sufficient number of unique IP addresses for all users of the Internet. It is for this reason IPv6 was developed to meet a greatly increased demand from a wide range of users of IP networks. On the other hand, the complexity of the Internet and its enormous size prolong the transition from the IPv4 process to the IPv6 process. Therefore, a cohabitation phase between the two versions is necessary. The key contribution of this paper is to present a study of the impact of the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 based on the tunneling mechanism in mobile environments.

Performance Analysis and Functionality Comparison of First Hop Redundancy Protocols

High levels of availability can be expensive to maintain, but a lack of availability may also increase costs as it may damage the reputation of the business. This has led to the development of techniques that reduce downtime until it became transparent to the user. First hop redundancy protocols are an essential tool for improving the availability of IP networks. First hop redundancy protocols are protocols used to manage and maintain network default gateway router by using one or more redundant routers that will take over in case of default router failure. In this paper, we evaluate the three particular protocols of FHRPs, namely the Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP), Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP), and Gateway Load Balancing (GLBP) using GNS3 tools. The First Hop Redundancy Protocols have been implemented, tested, optimized, and compared to one another in terms of convergence time, packet loss and CPU utilization. The comparison indicates which protocol is best in which scenario and which is best among the three protocols.

Federated Intelligence for Active Queue Management in Inter-Domain Congestion

Active Queue Management (AQM) has been considered as a paradigm for the complicated network management task of mitigating congestion by controlling buffer of network link queues. However, finding the right parameters for an AQM scheme is very challenging due to the dynamics of the IP networks. In addition, this problem becomes even more complex in inter-domain scenarios where several organizations interconnect each other with the limitation of not sharing raw and private data. As a result, existing AQM schemes have not been widely employed despite their advantages. Therefore, we present a solution that tackles the challenges of tuning the AQM parameters for inter-domain congestion control scenarios where the network management goes beyond an organization’s domain. We then introduce the Federated Intelligence for AQM (FIAQM) architecture, which enhances the existing AQM schemes by leveraging the Federated Learning approach. The proposed FIAQM framework is capable of dynamically adjusting the AQM parameters in a multi-domain setting, which is hard to achieve with the conventional AQM solutions working alone. To this end, FIAQM uses an artificial neural network, trained in a federated manner, to predict beyond-own-domain congestion and an intelligent AQM parameter tuner. The evaluation results show that FIAQM can effectively improve the performance of the inter-domain connections by reducing the congestion on their links while preserving the network data private within each participating domain.