Layer Protocol Research Articles

Intelligent TCP Congestion Control Scheme in Internet of Deep Space Things Communication

In deep space missions, large-scale deep space information and continuous sensory data are generated, processed, and exchanged over Internet of deep space things (IoDST). Ensuring reliable communication in IoDST requires resolution of challenges engendered by the unique characteristics of IoDST, including long propagation delays, link outages, high error rates, and asymmetric bandwidths. Thus, transmission control protocol (TCP) layer functionalities are crucial for ensuring reliable IoDST communications. However, existing TCP congestion control (CC) protocols present poor performance in IoDST communications, owing to the dependence of traditional window-based CC approaches on pre-configured rules to adjust transmission rate against the aforementioned unique characteristics. In this paper, we propose an intelligent CC scheme called optimistic actor–critic-based TCP congestion control (OAC-TCPCC) to solve the problems of the challenging link conditions in IoDST. OAC-TCPCC dynamically determines optimal congestion window for data transmission over IoDST communication links to maximize the TCP throughput performance and minimize file transfer time. Simulation results reveal that OAC-TCPCC improves the TCP throughput performance by up to 27%, 79%, 92%, 477%, 643%, and 766%; and reduces file transfer time by up to 16%, 37%, 50%, 48%, 58%, and 79%, compared to DRL-CC, TP-Planet, FAST TCP, TCP Peach, TCP BBR, and TCP CUBIC, respectively.

Congestion Control Mechanism on Transport Layer Protocol: The Application of Terahertz Frequency

Congestion Control Mechanism on Transport Layer Protocol: The Application of Terahertz Frequency

Securing web documents by using piggybacked framework based on Newton's forward interpolation method

The modern telecommunication system that transfers data over the web requires a secure channel so that integrity, authentication, and confidentiality of data are ensured. To achieve this, the SSL/TLS protocol of the transport layer provides end-to-end security to transfer data without any intrusion. But this security fails due to vulnerabilities reported in the last few years on SSL/TLS not ignorable which makes the data communication process vulnerable. The handshake protocol used by SSL/TLS decides a common session key to share the message among the communicating nodes. The common key remains the same in a session to encrypt entire data payload. If a hacker breaks into the session and accesses the key, then the entire session would be compromised. Therefore, there is a need for a mechanism that ensures the proper key exchanges so that the messages transferred during a session uses different keys for encryption and decryption process. This is achieved by implementing the key exchange mechanism using Newton's interpolation method which is used to generate a polynomial function that derives the key for the ongoing communications. The paper represents the result of the research conducted and also recommends a few changes to the existing key exchange mechanism.

PFDCT: An Enhanced Transport Layer Protocol for Precise Flow Control in Data Centers

This paper proposes an enhanced transport layer protocol for precise flow control in data centers, referred to as PFDCT, combining explicit rate control (priority scheduling) and implicit rate control (marking algorithm with dynamic threshold) innovatively, while satisfying the transmission requirements of each data flow. It enables multiple data flows to share the bandwidth fairly, which is rarely achieved by previous data transmission protocols. Our design stems from the observation that different packets in a data center network need to be processed differentially and that the accuracy of the feedback of the indication information to the link state will directly affect the effectiveness of the congestion control mechanism. Our tests show that PFDCT has lower network jitter, better fairness, and significant performance gains over existing proposals (DCTCP, ICTCP, and L2DCT) in terms of Flow Completion Time (FCT) and throughput on average. Furthermore, we discussed the impact of the marking algorithm with dynamic thresholds on the performance of PFDCT, and the results of the experiments show that the addition of the marking algorithm will further improve the performance of PFDCT in terms of packet loss rate, latency, and FCT.

Investigation of reconfigurable hardware platformsfor 5Gprotocol stack functions acceleration

Open RAN and 5G are two key technologies designed to qualitatively improve network infrastructure and provide greater flex-ibility and efficiency to mobile operators and users. 5G creates new capabilities for high-speed Internet, Internet of Things, telemedi-cine and many other applications, while Open RAN enables open and standardized network architectures, which reduces cost and risk for operators and promotes innovations. Given the growing number of users and data volumes, the purely software implementa-tion of certain functions of the 5G protocol, and especially computationally complex ones, requires significant computer resources and energy.These, for example, arelow-density parity-check (LDPC)coding,FFTandiFFT algorithms on physical (PHY)layer, and NEA and NIA security algorithms on Packet Data Convergence Protocol (PDCP)layer. Therefore, one of the activity areas in the development of means for 5G systems isthe hardware acceleration of such functions execution, which provides the possibility of processing large volumes of data in real time and with high efficiency. The high-performance hardware basis for implementing these functions today is field-programmable gate array(FPGA)integrated circuits.Along with this, the efficiency of the 5G protocol stack functions hardware acceleration depends significantly on the size of the data packets transmitted to the hardware accelerator. As ex-perience shows, for certain types of architecture of computer systems with accelerators, the acceleration value can take even a nega-tive value. This necessitates the search for alternative architectural solutions for the implementation of such systems.In this article the approaches for hardware acceleration using reconfigurable FPGA-based computing components are explored, their comparative analysis is performed, and architectural alternatives are evaluated for the implementation of a computing platform to perform the functions ofthe 5G protocol stack with hardware acceleration of PHY and medium access control(MAC)layers functions.

Teletraffic analysis and simulation on FSO systems: the traffic generators approach

Free Space Optical Communications (FSO) has become an interesting topic to researchers in recent years since the amount of data generated by devices is growing, and it is necessary to use data links that support high bandwidth to transmit them from one device to another. This technology is used to establish not only terrestrial links but also space links.A CubeSat satellite is generally deployed in the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) region. To maintain the altitude, the satellite must have a high orbital speed. For that reason, the time to transmit data between a particular ground station and the CubeSat satellite is limited. On the other hand, the volume, mass, and energy storage capacity are restricted in a CubeSat. The greater the bandwidth capacity of radio frequency links, the greater the demand for volume, mass, and energy they require. For that reason, to transmit a significant amount of data, traditional radio frequency links are not suitable and are becoming replaced by FSO as technology improves.Despite research in physical layer technologies on FSO (modulation schemes, error mitigation techniques, pointing and tracking systems), there is very little research in the literature about data link layer protocols for FSO. Secondly, there is little research to measure the data traffic demand on CubeSat satellites so that a certain data link layer protocol can be selected or adapted to be implemented in an FSO system.This paper presents research to address the issue of teletraffic through the use of traffic generators. The result is the design and development of a traffic generator for a discrete event simulator that will later be used to observe the behavior and to measure the performance of the Selective Repeat ARQ protocol in a simulated satellite FSO link, in order to propose improvements to adapt the protocol to this scenario.

Effective IoT Congestion Control Algorithm

The Internet of Things (IoT) connects devices via the Internet. Network congestion is one of the key problems that has been identified by researchers in the IoT field. When there is a huge number of IoT devices connected to the internet, this creates network congestion. Transfer control protocol is a transport layer protocol that provides a reliable end-to-end connection between two devices. Many Congestion Control Algorithms have been proposed to solve network congestion. However, there is no perfect solution to this problem. This paper proposes an effective loss-based Congestion Control Algorithm to effectively adapt the congestion window in the IoT environment. It uses simple experiment scenarios to test the algorithm for wired and wireless channels and observes important performance metrics: link utilization, inter-protocol fairness, intra-protocol fairness and throughput. The results are impressive, and the proposed algorithm is shown to outperform other standard algorithms.

A Multipath Transmission System for Information-Centric Networking Based on Standalone Name Resolution

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) essentially supports multipath transmission. However, current multipath schemes in ICN either necessitate major network infrastructure updates or necessitate specific network settings for terminal devices. To solve these problems, we propose MPTS-ICN, a multipath transmission system for ICN that realizes end-to-end multipath transmission. Taking the ICN architecture based on the standalone name resolution approach as a basis, MPTS-ICN is easier to implement and deploy than other ICN multipath schemes. Moreover, we have extended the original network layer protocol to support multipath data transmission in ICN. To set up concurrent transmission multipath efficiently, we propose a heuristic algorithm for the selection of multipath service nodes. Extensive experimental comparisons with existing data transmission methods show that in bandwidth-constrained scenarios, MPTS-ICN outperforms the best-route method by 83.6% and the ECMP method by 79.7% in average flow completion time.

Multi-connectivity in 5G New Radio: Optimal resource allocation for split bearer and data duplication

Mobile radio networks have been evolving towards the integration of services and devices with a diverse set of throughput, latency, and reliability requirements. To support these requirements, 3GPP has introduced Multi Connectivity (MC) as a more flexible architecture for 5G New Radio (NR), where multiple radio links can be simultaneously activated to split or duplicate data traffic. Multi connectivity improves single user performance at the cost of higher interference due to the increase of radio transmissions, which negatively affects system throughput.This paper analyzes the problem of admission control and resource allocation in multi connectivity scenarios, considering different requirements and 5G NR features. Specifically, we formulate two optimization problems that leverage the features of the Packet Data Convergence Protocol (PDCP) layer, which controls the flow of data packets of the data radio bearer: the PDCP Split-Bearer Decision (PSD) and the PDCP Duplication Decision (PDD) problems, which are tailored for the enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) and Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communications (uRLLC) services, respectively. We further provide heuristic approaches, specifically designed for the PSD and PDD problems, to effectively solve both these problems.Numerical results in realistic network deployments confirm that our solutions can effectively allocate radio resources increasing admission rate and system throughput, while guaranteeing the required reliability level.

Multi-Modal Industrial IoT Networks: Recent Advances and Future Challenges

AbstractWhile the ongoing fourth industrial revolution continues to be a major driver behind wireless communication technologies, some environments are so prohibitive that even state-of-the-art solutions can barely achieve ubiquitous wireless connectivity (if at all). For example, in industrial sites with large metal constructions (such as petrochemical plants), highly localized and time-varying changes in wireless link quality are quite common. Oddly enough, much of the capabilities needed to deal with such effects are already present at the physical layer (PHY), but remain largely unexploited by higher protocol layers. In fact, little Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) (IIoT) research has considered harnessing the full multi-modal capabilities of modern multi-PHY/multi-band IoT hardware in general. As such, in this vision paper, we: (1) analyze recent advances towards enabling multi-modal IIoT through link- and routing layer operations; and (2) describe challenges and opportunities for future IIoT deployments, based on the design choices that emerged from said analysis. In summary, we identify a combination of a modified/extended Time-Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) link layer, using either fixed or variable duration timeslots, together with a Parent-Oriented (PO) Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) (RPL) approach to be the most promising way forward.

Garbled Circuits from an SCA Perspective

Garbling schemes, invented in the 80’s by Yao (FOCS’86), have been a versatile and fundamental tool in modern cryptography. A prominent application of garbled circuits is constant round secure two-party computation, which led to a long line of study of this object, where one of the most influential optimizations is Free-XOR (Kolesnikov and Schneider ICALP’08), introducing a global offset Δ for all garbled wire values where XOR gates are computed locally without garbling them. To date, garbling schemes were not studied per their side-channel attacks (SCA) security characteristics, even though SCA pose a significant security threat to cryptographic devices. In this research we, demonstrate that adversaries utilizing advanced SCA tools such as horizontal attacks, mixed with advanced hypothesis building and standard (vertical) SCA tools, can jeopardize garbling implementations.Our main observation is that garbling schemes utilizing a global secret Δ open a door to quite trivial side-channel attacks. We model our side-channel attacks on the garbler’s device and discuss the asymmetric setting where various computations are not performed on the evaluator side. This enables dangerous leakage extraction on the garbler and renders our attack impossible on the evaluator’s side.Theoretically, we first demonstrate on a simulated environment, that such attacks are quite devastating. Concretely, our attack is capable of extracting Δ when the circuit embeds only 8 input non-linear gates with fifth/first-order attack Success-Rates of 0.65/0.7. With as little as 3 such gates, our attack reduces the first-order Guessing Entropy of Δ from 128 to ∼ 48-bits. We further demonstrate our attack via an implementation and power measurements data over an STM 32-bit processor software implementing circuit garbling, and discuss their limitations and mitigation tactics on logical, protocol and implementation layers.

Performance evaluation of AMQP over QUIC in the internet-of-thing networks

In today’s world, the use of IoT devices is growing every day. For connecting IoT devices from various vendors and supporting a variety of IoT use cases, an interoperable protocol like AMQP is necessary. Researchers are striving to minimize delay because many IoT applications are sensitive to it. The transport layer protocol that is used underneath, such as TCP or UDP, is one of the main causes of the delay. Although TCP is slower than UDP because to the three-way handshake and the usage of TLS for security, it is more reliable than UDP. The Internet Engineering Task Force has introduced a new transport layer protocol called QUIC that combines the best features of UDP and TCP to offer quick and reliable communication. In this study, we integrated QUIC and AMQP1.0 using the Go programming language. The Docker tool was used to containerize the AMQP1.0 Broker, Sender, and Receiver implementations. The performance of AMQP1.0 over TCP and AMQP1.0 over QUIC was benchmarked in the NS3 simulator over various wireless networks including WiFi, 4G/LTE, and satellite. QUIC showed considerable improvement over lossy networks. The results showed that switching from TCP to QUIC at the transport level lowered Communication Time by 8.57% over Satellite network. Although Round Trip Time was almost same yet Start up Latency showed improvement of 52%, 38% and 34% in case of WiFi, 4G/LTE and Satellite respectively. In addition, the performance of AMQP1.0 over TCP and AMQP1.0 over QUIC has been evaluated over different Packet Loss values, the results show that AMQP1.0 over QUIC outperforms AMQP1.0 over TCP in all the cases. The testing results revealed that TCP performance was degraded by 20%, 16%, and 36% over WiFi, 4G/LTE, and satellite, respectively at Packet loss of 15%, while QUIC performance was only degraded by 4%, 8%, and 9% in each of these cases.

Duo: A High-Throughput Reconfigurable Datacenter Network Using Local Routing and Control

The performance of many cloud-based applications critically depends on the capacity of the underlying datacenter network. A particularly innovative approach to improve the throughput in datacenters is enabled by emerging optical technologies, which allow to dynamically adjust the physical network topology, both in an oblivious or demand-aware manner. However, such topology engineering, i.e., the operation and control of dynamic datacenter networks, is considered complex and currently comes with restrictions and overheads. We present Duo, a novel demand-aware reconfigurable rack-to-rack datacenter network design realized with a simple and efficient control plane. Duo is based on the well-known de Bruijn topology (implemented using a small number of optical circuit switches) and the key observation that this topology can be enhanced using dynamic (''opportunistic'') links between its nodes. In contrast to previous systems, Duo has several desired features: i) It makes effective use of the network capacity by supporting integrated and multi-hop routing (paths that combine both static and dynamic links). ii) It uses a work-conserving queue scheduling which enables out-of-the-box TCP support. iii) Duo employs greedy routing that is implemented using standard IP longest prefix match with small forwarding tables. And iv) during topological reconfigurations, routing tables require only local updates, making this approach ideal for dynamic networks. We evaluate Duo in end-to-end packet-level simulations, comparing it to the state-of-the-art static and dynamic networks designs. We show that Duo provides higher throughput, shorter paths, lower flow completion times for high priority flows, and minimal packet reordering, all using existing network and transport layer protocols. We also report on a proof-of-concept implementation of Duo's control and data plane.

Use of QUIC for AMQP in IoT networks

The use of IoT devices is expanding every day in today’s environment. An interoperable protocol like AMQP is essential for supporting multiple IoT use cases and interconnecting IoT devices from different vendors. Many IoT applications are sensitive to delays, which researchers are working to avoid as much as possible. One of the main sources of the delay is the underlying transport layer protocol, such as TCP or UDP. TCP is more reliable than UDP, although it is slower due to the three-way handshake and the use of TLS for security. QUIC, a new transport layer protocol standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force, combines the finest aspects of UDP and TCP to provide quick and reliable communication. We use the Go programming language to integrate AMQP 1.0 with QUIC to reduce latency and improve battery life. The Docker tool is used to containerize the AMQP 1.0 Broker, Sender, and Receiver implementations, and various scenarios are tested in the NS3 simulator. The findings demonstrated that even though Round Trip Time was 71% higher for QUIC, using QUIC at the transport level improved Startup Latency and Total Communication Time by 62% and 22%, respectively. The proposed scheme (AMQP 1.0 over QUIC) transported 3.5 times more data than the existing scheme (AMQP 1.0 over TCP), but QUIC’s throughput was 7 times higher, which shorten the communication time and 31% less energy was consumed. Furthermore, metrics including Packet Loss, Delay, and Channel Bandwidth were used to compare the two schemes. The results showed that, with the exception of the low channel bandwidth scenario, the proposed scheme consistently outperformed the existing scheme.

Secure Data Distribution Architecture in IoT Using MQTT

Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) is one of the standard application layer protocols for the Internet of Things. It uses a publish/subscribe mechanism which organizes a set of clients around a server called the broker, which delivers published data to its intended recipients. This article proposes an architecture that allows MQTT brokers to cooperate and share their data with other interested MQTT brokers. It is a service-oriented architecture that wraps an MQTT broker with a well defined WebSockets-based interface which allows it to offer its topic space and published data to other MQTT brokers. The wrapped MQTT broker is called a broker service, and it discovers other broker services through a discovery service. Each broker service only connects to services that have data its clients are interested. Furthermore, these services are authenticated by obtaining tokens from an authentication service that registers and issues JSON Web Tokens for them. These tokens contain the identity and claims of their owners and they can be verified without contacting the authentication service. The proposed architecture simplifies data sharing and improves the security in scenarios with multiple MQTT brokers where clients can move between them. In these scenarios, the MQTT brokers need to obtain data based on their clients interests, which are constantly changing. It does so by isolating MQTT brokers into services that can be discovered and consumed over well-defined interfaces. The architecture was implemented in javascript using MQTT 3.1.1 standard complaint library. We demonstrate the performance characteristics of our architecture using our implementation through three scenarios, which are designed to compare the delay from publisher to subscriber when they operate within the same MQTT broker and different MQTT brokers. The results show that the overhead of our architecture is around 50% in two synthetic scenarios (performed on a single machine) and around 27% in a third scenario performed on the cloud with multiple virtual machines hosting the broker services and simulated clients.

QSec-RPL: Detection of version number attacks in RPL based mobile IoT using Q-Learning

Internet of Things (IoT) has revolutionized the networking by connecting the real world entities to the Internet. IoT connects the communication devices and has an incredible impact on perspective analytics on the massive volume of data produced every day. An attacker may exploit vulnerabilities of IoT entities and compromise users’ security and privacy. Development of solutions to address security and privacy issues of IoT is in premature stage and considered as challenge. This challenge becomes more critical when the devices in the network are resource-constrained in terms of energy, processing and memory. The IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN) has emerged in recent years as an adaptation layer to carry IPv6 packets over IEEE 802.15.4. Many IoT applications use Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) as a network layer protocol developed for routing in 6LoWPAN. Security is challenging in resource constrained environment where encryption may not be a viable solution. Version number attack is one of the most common network layer attacks against RPL based 6LoWPAN. The RPL specification does not address the integrity of the version number and therefore leaves version number mechanism as a weak point in terms of security. This paper investigates the impact of version number attack in RPL networks while considering mobility of the sensor nodes. We propose a solution that utilizes Q-Learning strategy to detect the malicious nodes that are performing version number attack. The proposed approach detects malicious nodes with reasonable accuracy while imposing significantly less overhead on the nodes of low power and lossy networks. There are other approaches too like Message Authentication Codes (MAC) based on symmetric keys but these techniques have memory and communication overhead. So we propose different approach Q-Learning to detect the attacker nodes.

Improved Congestion Control in Wireless Sensor Networks Using Clustering with Metaheuristic Approach

The wireless sensor network (WSN) assists an extensive range of sensor nodes and enables several real-time uses. Congestion on the WSN is based on high pocket traffic and low wireless communication capabilities under network topology. Highly loaded nodes will consume power quickly and increase the risk of the network going offline or breaking. Additionally, loss of packet and buffer overflows would result in an outcome of increased end-to-end delay, performance deterioration of heavily loaded nodes, and transport communication loss. In this paper, a novel congestion control system is proposed to diminish the congestion on network and to enhance the throughput of the network. Initially, cluster head (CH) selection is achieved by exhausting K-means clustering algorithm. After the selection of cluster head, an efficient approach for congestion management is designed to select adaptive path by using Adaptive packet rate reduction (APTR) algorithm. Finally, Ant colony optimization (ACO) is utilized for enhancement of wireless sensor network throughput. The objective function increases the wireless sensor network throughput by decreasing the congestion on network. The proposed system is simulated with (Network Simulator NS-2). The proposed K-means C-ACO-ICC-WSN attains higher throughput 99.56%, 95.62% and 93.33%, lower delay 4.16%, 2.12% and 3.11% and minimum congestion level 1.19%, 2.33% and 5.16% and the proposed method is likened with the existing systems as Fuzzy-enabled congestion control through cross layer protocol exploiting OABC on WSN (FC-OABC-CC-WSN), Optimized fuzzy clustering at wireless sensor networks with improved squirrel search algorithm (FLC-ISSA-CC-WSN) and novel energy-aware clustering process through lion pride optimizer (LPO) and fuzzy logic on wireless sensor networks (EAC-LPO-CC-WSN), respectively. Finally, the simulation consequences demonstrate that proposed system may be capable of minimizing that congestion level and improving the throughput of the network.

Detection of Vampire Attacks in Ad-Hoc Wireless Sensor Network using PLGP protocol

Wireless networks are an ideal research direction in the areas of sensors and pervasive computing. Wireless ad-hoc sensor networks are a new platform in the fields of remote sensing, data collection, analysis, problem solving, and various research studies. They contain nodes that act as transmitters and receivers, and are vulnerable to various attacks and incur various types of loss. Resource exhaustion attacks, once considered just a routing problem, now fall into a new group called "vampire attacks." A resource exhaustion or vampire attack drains a node's batteries, rendering them useless. Vampire attacks are not specific protocols and are hard to spot. This paper examines the identification and protection of resource exhaustion attacks at the routing protocol layer using the PLGP protocols (Parno, Luk, Gaustad, and Perrig). This white paper focuses primarily on detecting and preventing vampire attacks. The proposed method is used to prevent network node exhaustion. This greatly reduces the problem of vampire attacks.

PBQ-Enhanced QUIC: QUIC with Deep Reinforcement Learning Congestion Control Mechanism.

Currently, the most widely used protocol for the transportation layer of computer networks for reliable transportation is the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). However, TCP has some problems such as high handshake delay, head-of-line (HOL) blocking, and so on. To solve these problems, Google proposed the Quick User Datagram Protocol Internet Connection (QUIC) protocol, which supports 0-1 round-trip time (RTT) handshake, a congestion control algorithm configuration in user mode. So far, the QUIC protocol has been integrated with traditional congestion control algorithms, which are not efficient in numerous scenarios. To solve this problem, we propose an efficient congestion control mechanism on the basis of deep reinforcement learning (DRL), i.e., proximal bandwidth-delay quick optimization (PBQ) for QUIC, which combines traditional bottleneck bandwidth and round-trip propagation time (BBR) with proximal policy optimization (PPO). In PBQ, the PPO agent outputs the congestion window (CWnd) and improves itself according to network state, and the BBR specifies the pacing rate of the client. Then, we apply the presented PBQ to QUIC and form a new version of QUIC, i.e., PBQ-enhanced QUIC. The experimental results show that the proposed PBQ-enhanced QUIC achieves much better performance in both throughput and RTT than existing popular versions of QUIC, such as QUIC with Cubic and QUIC with BBR.

Fiberless optical communication: issues and challenges

Abstract To fulfill the requirement of high data rate with variable quality of service, optical wireless communication is a better option in comparison to existing RF system and is a favorable technological candidate for future optical communication. In wireless optical communication, information is transmitted by propagation of optical wave through the atmosphere. The detrimental effects of channel parameters can acutely limit the utility of an optical wireless communication system. The paper first reviews different channel models in the context to outdoor wireless communication. Different impairments that affect the performance of outdoor optical communication systems and different techniques to mitigate these impairments are then investigated. The upper layer protocols for free space optical communication are also discussed.