Legacy Protocols Research Articles

Evolving from Legacy Protocols: Transitioning from RIP and EIGRP to OSPF, IS-IS and BGP

With the advent of the internet and growing complexity in the networking environment, old protocols like Routing Information Protocol (RIP) or Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP) pose significant bottlenecks for modern businesses and service providers. This paper provides an overview on the evolution of RIP and EIGRP, its limitations as Interior Gateway Protocols (IGPs), the benefits of moving to newer and more powerful protocols such as Open Shortest path First (OSPF), Intermediate System to Intermediate System (IS-IS) and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). The paper further dives deep into migration strategies from legacy protocols to OSPF or ISIS. OSPF and IS-IS are considered the best enterprise routing solutions and service provider routing solutions respectively due to their scalability, performance and flexibility. In addition, it highlights the importance of BGP as an external gateway protocol to control routing across autonomous systems. The findings aims to aid network engineers in making educated decisions on protocol implementation and migration efforts. Keywords— RIP, OSPF, IS-IS, BGP, Migration Strategies, Convergence time, Scalability.

Effects of secured DNS transport on resolver performance

Designed 40 years ago, DNS is still a core component of the Internet: billions of DNS queries are processed each day to resolve domain names to IP addresses. Originally designed for performance and scalability, its transport protocol is unencrypted, leading to security flaws. Recently, secure protocols have emerged, but the question of their scalability and sustainability remains open. In this paper, we study the cost of switching from the legacy DNS transport to the newer ones, by first characterising the shape of the traffic between clients and secured public resolvers. Then we replicate said traffic, to measure the added cost of each protocol. We found that, while connections usually stayed open, many closures and openings were made in some cases. Comparing these profiles over different DNS transports, we observe that switching from the legacy protocol to a more secure one can lead to an important performance penalty.

A Consistent Augmented Stacking Polynomial Optimized Tool (ASPOT) for Improving Security of Cloud-IoT Systems

The cloud computing transforms information technology by offering end users simulated, flexible resources on demand that require fewer resources and facilities giving them greater flexibility. These materials are delivered over the Internet using predefined networking protocols, regulations, and styles, and they are overseen by various management groups. There are flaws and vulnerabilities in the underlying technology and legacy protocols that could allow an attacker to get access. A recent assessment of the literature led to the conclusion that most intelligence algorithms have a number of complex issues, including a high false prediction rate, difficulty classifying threats, high processing costs, and system load. Hence, the proposed work aims to develop an innovative and lightweight Augmented Stacking Polynomial Optimized Tool (ASPOT) for strengthening the cloud-IoT system security against modern cyberattacks with a accuracy of 99%. The current study uses the lightweight Deep Augmented Preprocessing Model (DAPM) to clean and normalize the input cyber-attack dataset by executing transformation and normalization operations on it. Furthermore, the Binary Sand Cat Swarm Optimization (BSCSO) technique is utilized to identify the most significant and relevant features of the normalized dataset in an optimal manner. Moreover, the class of assaults is promptly and precisely identified from the given data by applying the Deep Stacking Polynomial Learning Network (DSPLN) technology. The effectiveness and results of the proposed ASPOT method are analysed with the use of current cyber-attack statistics and a variety of assessment metrics.

Experiences Modeling a OPC UA / DDS Gateway in AADL in the Context of Fog Computing

The legacy protocols still used in industrial automation are an obstacle to interoperability. In the meantime, while newer protocols are slowly replacing gateways, they can provide a bridge between new and legacy protocols. The Architecture Analysis & Design Language (AADL) was used in the Fog Computing for Robotics and Industrial Automation (FORA) project to model a Fog Computing Platform (FCP). Part of the FCP is an OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) / Data Distribution Service (DDS) gateway. The main goal was to develop an AADL model that allows the creation of platform-specific instances of such a gateway and the creation of other gateways. While the gateway model is incomplete, it formed the basis for several gateway prototypes. Challenges included complex data structures and tooling issues related to code generation. Nevertheless, the experiences with the AADL modeling of the gateway and the FCP were positive overall.

Review of the Legacy and Future of IEC 61850 Protocols Encompassing Substation Automation System

Communication protocols play a pivotal role in the substation automation system as they carry critical information related to asset control, automation, protection, and monitoring. Substation legacy protocols run the assets’ bulk data on multiple wires over long distances. These data packets pass through multiple nodes, which makes the identification of the location and type of various malfunctions a challenging and time-consuming task. As downtime of substations is of high importance from a regulatory and compliance point of view, utilities are motivated to revisit the overall scheme and redesign a new system that features flexibility, adaptability, interoperability, and high accuracy. This paper presents a comprehensive review of various legacy protocols and highlights the path forward for a new protocol laid down as per the IEC 61850 standard. The IEC 61850 protocol is expected to be user-friendly, employ fiber optics instead of conventional copper wires, facilitate the application of non-conventional instrument transformers, and connect Ethernet wires to multiple intelligent electronic devices. However, deployment of smart protocols in future substations is not a straightforward process as it requires careful planning, shutdown and foreseeable issues related to interface with proprietary vendor equipment. Along with the technical issues of communication, future smart protocols call for advanced personnel and engineering skills to embrace the new technology.

The Department of Veterans' Affairs Depleted Uranium Cohort in the Time of COVID-19: Translating a Traditional Surveillance Protocol to a Telehealth Platform.

In 2021, 37 members of a cohort of depleted uranium-exposed Gulf War I veterans were evaluated using a protocol tailored to accommodate COVID-19 safety practices on a telehealth platform. Individual elements of the legacy protocol were reviewed for urgency and feasibility of inclusion in a modified, telehealth platform. The redesigned protocol included a participant readiness for telehealth assessment, nurse and physician telehealth visits, collection of usual health questionnaires, and urine collections for exposure monitoring for uranium and other fragment-related metal measures. Despite some limitations in scope, the telehealth platform permitted a visual "visit" with surveillance participants who expressed a high comfort level with the format. The telehealth platform has apparent utility for occupational surveillance and should be explored as a standard approach for surveillance outside of public health emergencies.

Optimization Enabled Deep Learning-Based DDoS Attack Detection in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a vast revolution in information technology (IT) that inhibits scalable and virtualized sources to end users with low infrastructure cost and maintenance. They also have much flexibility and these resources are supervised by various management organizations and provided over the Internet by known standards, formats, and networking protocols. Legacy protocols and underlying technologies consist of vulnerabilities and bugs which open doors for intrusion by network attackers. Attacks as distributed denial of service (DDoS) are one of most frequent attacks, which impose heavy damage and affect performance of the cloud. In this research work, DDoS attack detection is easily identified in an optimized way through a novel algorithm, namely, the proposed gradient hybrid leader optimization (GHLBO) algorithm. This optimized algorithm is responsible to train a deep stacked autoencoder (DSA) that detects the attack in an efficient manner. Here, fusion of features is carried out by deep maxout network (DMN) with an overlap coefficient, and augmentation of data is carried out by the oversampling process. Furthermore, the proposed GHLBO is generated by integrating the gradient descent and hybrid leader-based optimization (HLBO) algorithm. Also, this proposed method is assessed by various performance metrics, such as the true positive rate (TPR), true negative rate (TNR), and testing accuracy with values attained as 0.909, 0.909, and 0.917, accordingly.

Empirical Comparison of Block Relay Protocols

Block relay protocols play a key role in the performance and security of public blockchains. As a result, several such protocols have been deployed in the context of Bitcoin and its variants (e.g. legacy, compact block relay and Graphene) in an attempt to reduce bandwidth utilization. However, the relative performance of these protocols in realistic networking conditions (e.g. with nodes churning -joining and leaving the network) is still not known. This paper aims to fill this key knowledge gap using an experimental testbed of twelve full nodes connected to the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. With the aid of novel logging tools, we contrast the performance of these three protocols, in realistic scenarios, with respect to communication, delay, and block decoding success. Our main findings are that Graphene generally performs the best when nodes remain connected, boasting an average propagation delay of 190 ms (i.e. 29% lower than compact block and 80% lower than the legacy protocol). However, when nodes churn at a high rate, compact blocks may perform better. Through a careful temporal analysis, we identify some root causes of the protocol inefficiencies, together with potential mitigation. We have made our measurement framework and experimental logs publicly available to the broader research community.

FybrrLink: Efficient QoS-Aware Routing in SDN Enabled Future Satellite Networks

Providing high-speed Internet services using satellite networks have attracted researchers from both academia and industry mainly due to the characteristics of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks such as global coverage, scalability, and lower transmission delays. Implementation of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) in Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTNs) can help to achieve the goals set for 5G and beyond networks. Since satellite networks have a specific architecture, some of the legacy protocols no longer remain useful. Therefore, to satisfy the diverse Quality of Service (QoS) requirements for a variety of applications, we propose a novel and centralized QoS-aware routing algorithm, called fybrrLink in which the global view of the network in SDN is utilized. We implement a modified Bresenham’s algorithm and Dijkstra’s algorithm to find the optimal path in a significantly reduced computation time. Also, taking advantage of the deterministic satellite constellation, we propose a flow rule transfer algorithm and a topology monitoring algorithm. Further, fybrrLink is evaluated with multiple NS3 simulations, and results confirm that our approach outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms.

Automatic whitelist generation system for ethernet based in-vehicle network

Owing to the development of industrial internet of things (IIoT) technology, the connectivity and complexity of vehicles have also increased, and new communication technologies have been introduced to in-vehicle networks (IVN). In order to achieve a sufficient level of IIoT cybersecurity, strict ground rules must exist in the critical infrastructures (CI). Traditionally, many legacy communication techniques such as controller area networks (CAN), and FlexRay have been proposed and used for IVN and CI. However, these legacy protocols cannot accommodate advanced IIoT technologies that require high connectivity; hence, Ethernet for vehicles has been introduced in recent years. The phenomenon of introducing Ethernet to IVN is an irreversible industrial trend, such as Ethernet-based Smart Factory, Smart City, and industrial control system based on IIoT. Some automotive Ethernet protocols such as MOST150 and BroadR-Reach have been commercialized primarily for infotainment and are being expanded for providing IIoT services. However, security studies pertaining to automotive Ethernet are incomplete. Even though the amount of data that must be processed by security solutions in the Ethernet environment is increasing, vehicles must be guaranteed ‘hard real-time’. In this study, to reflect the characteristics of IVN security such as real-time, extensibility, and certainty, we establish an IVN simulation environment based on several Ethernet protocols and propose an automatic whitelist generation system. The whitelist performs filtering based on certain criteria, and after it is defined, the time consumed for packet preprocessing is extremely small. The proposed system is designed to create a whitelist through learning to ensure extensibility in an IVN environment composed of heterogeneous networks. The proposed system operates in two stages: the first step automatically generates three types of whitelists, i.e., global, local, and connection, by learning the network; the second step performs filtering by applying the generated rule. The whitelists generated through the proposed system filter out abnormal packets or sections based on the alert levels. The proposed system is expected to cope flexibly with various potential cyber threats on IVNs in the future.

Single Source of the Truth in Media Data Centers

<italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Single source of truth is an important concept in modern data center management practices. It is fundamental to reliably automate the configuration, deployment, and management of resources in large data centers. Legacy media systems that incorporate dedicated resource registries, such as Network Media Open Specification (NMOS), are maladapted to integration into single source of truth data center management systems because they introduce their own, additional, dedicated source of truth. Permitting multiple sources of truth to emanate in a new system to accommodate legacy system integration has the effect of increasing system complexity and decreasing system reliability. Open legacy protocols, such as the NMOS, however, make it feasible to consider new implementations that resolve the legacy maladaptation problem and preserve a new system’s single source of truth design principles</i> .

Energy and bandwidth efficiency optimization of quantum-enabled optical communication channels

We present a systematic study of quantum receivers and modulation methods enabling resource efficient quantum-enhanced optical communication. We introduce quantum-inspired modulation schemes that theoretically yield a better resource efficiency than legacy protocols. Experimentally, we demonstrate below the shot-noise limit symbol error rates for M ≤ 16 legacy and quantum-inspired communication alphabets using software-configurable optical communication time-resolving quantum receiver testbed. Further, we experimentally verify that our quantum-inspired modulation schemes boost the accuracy of practical quantum measurements and significantly optimize the combined use of energy and bandwidth for communication alphabets that are longer than M = 4 symbols.

DDS and OPC UA Protocol Coexistence Solution in Real-Time and Industry 4.0 Context Using Non-Ideal Infrastructure.

Continuing the evolution towards Industry 4.0, the industrial communication protocols represent a significant topic of interest, as real-time data exchange between multiple devices constitute the pillar of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) scenarios. Although the legacy protocols are still persistent in the industry, the transition was initiated by the key Industry 4.0 facilitating protocol, the Open Platform Communication Unified Architecture (OPC UA). OPC UA has to reach the envisioned applicability, and it therefore has to consider coexistence with other emerging real-time oriented protocols in the production lines. The Data Distribution Service (DDS) will certainly be present in future architectures in some areas as robots, co-bots, and compact units. The current paper proposes a solution to evaluate the real-time coexistence of OPC UA and DDS protocols, functioning in parallel and in a gateway context. The purpose is to confirm the compatibility and feasibility between the two protocols alongside a general definition of criteria and expectations from an architectural point of view, pointing out advantages and disadvantages in a neutral manner, shaping a comprehensive view of the possibilities. The researched architecture is meant to comply with both performance comparison scenarios and interaction scenarios over a gateway application. Considering the industrial tendencies, the developed solution is applied using non-ideal infrastructures to provide a more feasible and faster applicability in the production lines.

An Efficient Interaction Protocol Inference Scheme for Incompatible Updates in IoT Environments

Incompatible updates of IoT systems and protocols give rise to interoperability problems. Even though various protocol adaptation and unknown protocol inference schemes have been proposed, they either do not work where the updated protocol specifications are not given or suffer from inefficiency issues. In this work, we present an efficient protocol inference scheme for incompatible updates in IoT environments. The scheme refines an active automata learning algorithm, L*, by incorporating a knowledge base of the legacy protocol behavior into its membership query selection procedure for updated protocol behavior inference. It also infers protocol syntax based on our previous work that computes the most probable message field updates and adapts the legacy protocol message accordingly. We evaluate the proposed scheme with two case studies with the most popular IoT protocols and prove that it infers updated protocols efficiently while improving the L* algorithm’s performance for resolving the incompatibility.

Protocols for Transferring Bulk Data Over Internet: Current Solutions and Future Challenges

Big Data has gained interests in effectively capturing, storing, analysis and visualisation from wide range of scientific, economic and business communities and is frequently communicated over internet for various purposes among government and enterprise sectors sited at different locations. Several experiments and analyses have shown that currently employed applications and transport protocols in internet are not suitable for transferring such voluminous data because of not addressing requirements of low-access latency. This paper presents issues associated with the basic mechanism of legacy protocols in the context of high speed networks for transferring Big Data e.g. conservative TCP congestion control mechanism may result in minute utilisation of high bandwidth provisioning networks. We present state-of-art alternatives proposed in the literature to solve these problems in high speed networks. We compare several underlying emerging alternatives of TCP, UDP and multi-TCP-streams protocols over a number of comparison criteria e.g. protocol convergence, responsiveness etc., to handle communication of huge data. We note that these protocol alternatives have significant importance over fulfilling requirements of emerging data-intensive applications in high-speed networks. In addition, we discuss open research issues and challenges that can be explored as a source of motivation towards development and deployment of data-intensive applications in emerging networking technologies.

Design and Performance Analysis for Edge Intelligence‐Based F‐PMIPv6 Mobility Support for Smart Manufacturing

In this paper, we propose a new mobility management network, i‐FP, to be used in the smart factory that continues to develop in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. i‐FP was created to solve the current local mobility management problem of legacy frameworks. MN (mobile node) refers to a mobile device in a manufacturing environment that includes workers, production facilities, and AGV. To allow mobile nodes (MNs) to move from one domain to another, i‐FP uses three network entities: LFA (Local Factory Anchor), FAG (Factory Access Gateway), and MN, as an extended concept of PMIPv6. Among the three network entities in i‐FP, LFA and FAG can act as edge intelligence devices to reduce the handover latency of the MNs. i‐FP also uses IP header‐swapping mechanisms to prevent traffic overhead and enhance network throughput. We evaluate new framework i‐FP, PMIPv6, and HMIPv6, which are legacy protocols of local mobility management, in various ways and evaluate three schemes. We confirm that i‐FP works better than do the other network methods used in the smart factory.

Modelling protocol gateways for cyber-physical systems using Architecture Analysis & Design Language

Developing, configuring, and deploying legacy protocol gateways for existing cyber-physical systems to improve interoperability remains challenging. A possible solution is using model-driven engineering languages such as the Architecture Analysis & Design Language (AADL) that enables combined modelling of software, hardware, and communication for distributed systems. Experiences made while creating an OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) / Data Distribution Service (DDS) gateway indicate the suitability of AADL to model complex software artefacts. Moreover, a proposed process reduces the development and configuration effort for platform-specific gateway instances. A challenge to be addressed is the generation of executable code for resource-constraint devices.

WLAN performance evaluation in different wireless access techniques (DCF, PCF, HCF)

IEEE 802.11x Wireless Local-Area-Network (WLAN) considered a powerful solution for the last mile wireless broadband(BB) access. WLAN becomes important element in 4G and 5G mobile networks because it can provide services to mobile users in areas not covered by eNBs. However, the 802.11 legacy protocol doesn’t support delay-sensitive services like VoIP because it adopts the best-effort method. In 2001 IEEE 802.11e standard was proposed to deploy QoS with new access techniques introduction. There are many parameters related to MAC layer which affect the WLAN network performance from the prospective of delay, and throughput. This study presents performance evaluation of voice traffic and FTP traffic in IEEE802.11 legacy protocol WLAN and IEEE802.11e WLAN via OPNET computer simulation. Network performance will be tested against different MAC access protocols and different MAC parameters.

Integrating Electrical Substations Within the IoT Using IEC 61850, CoAP, and CBOR

Electrical substations are crucial elements of Smart Grids (SGs), where they are mainly responsible for voltage transformations. However, due to the integration of distributed energy resources in the grid, substations now have to provide additional grid management capabilities which in turn require supervision and automation solutions for large low-voltage grids. A recurring challenge in such deployments are siloed systems that are due to noninteroperable communication protocols across substations: although most substations’ communication is based on the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 61850 standard, deployed legacy protocols lag behind modern communication technologies in terms of performance, hindering the full transition to lightweight protocols. This paper demonstrates that IEC 61850 can be fully mapped to the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) in combination with the Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) format while improving system performance compared to existing alternatives [e.g., WS-SOAP and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)]. On average, CoAP+CBOR needs 44% and 18% of the message size and 71% and 85% of the time compared to systems based on HTTP and WS-* Web services, respectively—this is especially relevant for resource-constrained devices and networks in electrical grids. In addition, CoAP is based on the REpresentational State Transfer (REST) architectural style, which supports system integration and interoperability through uniform identification and interaction. This approach fosters the standard-compliant integration of legacy platforms with modern substations as well as current IoT systems in neighboring domains, such as building management and infrastructure automation systems.

A comparison of mechanisms for RTC in the context of IoT

Real Time Communications (RTC) involve several technologies and protocols that have been instrumental to the establishment of media sessions over packet switching networks. Well known legacy protocols like Session Initialization Protocol (SIP) and Real Time Protocol (RTP) are the preferred mechanisms to accomplish this goal, however, in Internet of Things (IoT) environments where computational resources are limited, their use becomes a challenge. Because several applications in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) require image transmission, in this paper we introduce a mechanism that provides media packetization relying on IoT-specific transport protocols. Specifically, sensors that already include a Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) stack can reuse it to provide media transport. The performance of CoAP based image transmission is compared against that of traditional RTC transport from both the theoretical and the experimental perspective.