Network Layer Solutions Research Articles

Mobility–Multihoming Duality

In modern Internet-based communication, especially mobile systems, a mobile node (MN) will commonly have more than one possibility for Internet Protocol (IP) connectivity. For example, an MN such as a smartphone may be associated with an IEEE 802.11 network at a site while also connected to a cellular base station for 5G. In such a scenario, the smartphone might only be able to utilise the IEEE 802.11 network, not making use of the cellular connectivity simultaneously. Currently, IP does not allow applications and devices to easily utilise multiple IP connectivity opportunities—multihoming for the MN—without implementing special mechanisms to manage them. We demonstrate how the use of the Identifier Locator Network Protocol (ILNP), realised as an extension to IPv6, can enable mobility with multihoming using a duality mechanism that treats mobility and multihoming as the same logical concept. We present a network layer solution that does not require any modification to transport protocols, can be implemented using existing application programming interfaces (APIs), and can work for any application. We have evaluated our approach using an implementation in Linux and a testbed. The testbed consisted of commercial equipment to demonstrate that our approach can be used over existing network infrastructure requiring only normal unicast routing for IPv6.

The Evolution of Quantum Key Distribution Networks: On the Road to the Qinternet

Quantum key distribution (QKD) constitutes a symmetric secret key negotiation protocol capable of maintaining information-theoretic security. Given the recent advances in QKD networks, they have evolved from academic research to some preliminary applications. A QKD network consists of two or more QKD nodes interconnected by optical fiber or free space links. The secret keys are negotiated between any pair of QKD nodes, and then they can be delivered to multiple users in various areas for ensuring long-term protection and forward secrecy. We commence by introducing the QKD basics, followed by reviewing the development of QKD networks and their implementation in practice. Subsequently, we describe the general QKD network architecture, its elements, as well as its interfaces and protocols. Next, we provide an in-depth overview of the associated physical layer and network layer solutions, followed by the standardization efforts as well as the application scenarios associated with QKD networks. Finally, we discuss the potential future research directions and provide design guidelines for QKD networks.

Investigating the Performance of the MPT Multipath Communication Library in IPv4 and IPv6

The currently used mobile devices (laptops, tablets, mobile phones) contain many built-in network cards for communication (e.g. Wi-Fi, 3G, Bluetooth, etc.). A natural request could be combining the resources of the different network connection possibilities in order to increase the throughput of the communication. Unfortunately the standard IP communication technology does not support it: the communication is restricted to one IP address (i.e. to one interface). The Multipath TCP (MPTCP) specification (appeared in January 2013) offers a Transport layer solution of using more than one interface in a TCP communication session. In this paper we investigate a Network layer solution. The MPT multipath communication library opens the multipath communication possibility in the Network layer. Using the MPT library, applications built on the UDP protocol are also able to perform multipath communication. The MPT library was developed by using a full dual-stack technology, which means the MPT based multipath environment can be used both in IPv4 and IPv6. Protocol version change is also possible: an IPv6 based application is able to run in an IPv4 multipath environment, and an IPv4 application can be used in an IPv6 multipath environment. In this paper we give a short overview on the MPT communication library’s working mechanism and detailed numerical examples will be shown to present how the MPT library aggregates the paths’ throughput in IPv4 and IPv6 environments. The main contribution of the paper is to demonstrate the effective throughput aggregation property of the MPT library in IPv6 and in mixed (i.e. protocol version change) environments.

Mechanism to Mitigate Application Layer DDoS Attack with a Light Weight Trust Approach

New application layer DDoS attacks is a continuous critical threat to which network layer solutions is not applicable as attackers are indistinguishable based on packets or protocols. The increase in Internet-based transactions and communications offers new opportunities for hackers to disrupt business operations with DDoS attacks to prevent legitimate users from accessing services. In this paper, we propose Trust Management Helmet (TMH) as a partial solution to this problem, which is a lightweight mitigation mechanism that uses trust to differentiate legitimate users and attackers. Its key insight is that to protecting the connectivity of good users during application layer DDoS attacks, evaluation is based on their visiting history, and used to schedule the service to their requests. This paper introduces a license, for user identification (even beyond NATs) and storing the trust information at clients. The license is cryptographically secured against forgery or replay attacks. This mitigation mechanism and implement it as a Java package and use it for simulation. Through simulation, we show that TMH is effective in mitigating session flooding attack.

A lightweight mutual authentication mechanism for network mobility in IEEE 802.16e wireless networks

Many mobile network nodes (MNNs) in public transport move together as a large-scale mobile network. Therefore, RFC 3963 proposes a network layer solution called network mobility (NEMO) as the basic support protocol for network mobility management. NEMO is designed so that network mobility is transparent to nodes in the mobile network, thereby reducing the signaling overhead. However, NEMO does not specify how authentication, authorization and accounting (AAA) should be handled, and it inherits the drawbacks of long handoff latency from Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6). In this paper, we develop a lightweight mutual authentication mechanism (LMAM) with low computational overhead and achieve local authentication based on NEMO and the AAA model over IEEE 802.16e networks. Moreover, LMAM can resist various attacks. In addition, we propose an enhanced hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (E-HMIPv6) scheme to reduce intra-domain handoff latency. We then integrate LMAM into E-HMIPv6 without increasing the signaling overhead. Our analysis results show that the integrated scheme, called LE-HMIPv6 outperforms existing schemes in terms of authentication and handoff latency.

QoS-Aware Routing and Admission Control in Shadow-Fading Environments for Multirate MANETs

Providing quality of service (QoS) assurances in a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is difficult due to node mobility, contention for channel access, a lack of centralized co-ordination, and the unreliable nature of the wireless channel. A QoS-aware routing (QAR) protocol and an admission control (AC) protocol are two of the most important components of a system attempting to provide QoS guarantees in the face of the above mentioned difficulties faced. Many QAR and AC-based solutions have been proposed, but such network layer solutions are often designed and studied with idealized lower layer models in mind. This means that existing solutions are not designed for dealing with practical phenomena such as shadow fading and the link quality-dependent fluctuation of link transmission rates. This paper proposes and evaluates new solutions for improving the performance of QAR and AC protocols in the face of mobility, shadowing, and varying link SINR. It is found that proactively maintaining backup routes for active sessions, adapting transmission rates, and routing around temporarily low-SINR links can noticeably improve the reliability of assured throughput services.

Mitigating application layer distributed denial of service attacks via effective trust management

Nowadays, web servers are suffering from application layer distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, to which network layer solutions is not applicable as attackers are indistinguishable based on packets or protocols. In this study, the authors propose trust management helmet (TMH) as a partial solution to this problem, which is a lightweight mitigation mechanism that uses trust to differentiate legitimate users from attackers. Its key insight is that a server should give priority to protecting the connectivity of good users during application layer DDoS attacks, instead of identifying all the attack requests. The trust to clients is evaluated based on their visiting history and used to schedule the service to their requests. The authors introduce license, for user identification (even beyond NATs) and storing the trust information at clients. The license is cryptographically secured against forgery or replay attacks. The authors realise this mitigation mechanism and implement it as a Java package and use it for evaluation. The simulation results show that TMH is effective in mitigating session flooding attack: even with 20 times number of attackers, more than 99% of the sessions from legitimate users are accepted with TMH; whereas less than 18% are accepted without it. Moreover, we found that the additional computation cost on the deployed server is neglectable and the bandwidth overhead is acceptable.

Review of QoS mechanisms for mobile Ad Hoc networks

There are difficulties to guarantee QoS of mobile Ad Hoc networks due to their features of dynamically changing topology and wireless communication.Current QoS techniques for mobile Ad Hoc networks are divided into five categories: link layer solutions,network layer solutions,transport layer solutions,cross layers solutions and cross networks solutions.The main link layer solutions are QoS MAC protocols.The main idea in network layer solutions is QoS routing.Wireless TCP is the main scheme to guarantee QoS in transport layer.To choose route and balance load,cross layer solutions were researched to provide network architectures to support QoS.The main idea in cross network solutions is to propose QoS solutions between mobile Ad Hoc networks and fixed networks.These QoS solutions were introduced and analyzed.

Cooperation Enhancement for Message Transmission in VANETs

As one special case of the Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET), vehicular ad-hoc networking (VANET) is featured by its high mobility and constantly changing topology. In VANET, nodes can work properly only if the participating vehicles cooperate with each other during communications. However, as a distributed network, individual vehicles might be non-cooperative for their own benefits. In order to prevent non-cooperative vehicles from tampering packet relaying in the network, we propose a cooperation enhancement mechanism using "Neighborhood WatchDog" to generate "Trust Token" based on the first-hand observation. Therefore, trust relationships and packet-acceptance decisions of the receiving nodes are based on the instant observation and the token-proved relaying behavior of the benign neighboring vehicles. With the inherit mapping between the Electronic ID of one vehicle and its public key, keys can be distributed on-the-fly. As a network layer solution, the cooperation enhancement mechanism proposed in this paper is built on the top of our previous proposed Media Access Control (MAC) protocol: Relative Position Based-MAC (RPB-MAC).

A simulation study of IP‐based vertical handoff in wireless convergent networks

AbstractThe advances in wireless networks and IP technologies has brought ubiquitous access to all‐IP information into reality. For wireless IP services, IP‐based handoff is a critical issue to the performance of application‐level services. Although mobile IP (MIP) and its extensions, as network layer solutions, have been proposed as de facto standard, transmission throughput degradation due to packet loss, registration delay, and transport layer blocking are unavoidable because of MIP handoff mechanisms. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of a transport layer handoff approach, mobile stream control transmission protocol (mSCTP), and compare it with that of a network layer solution, MIP. mSCTP is based on stream control transmission protocol (SCTP), which is the third general purpose transport layer protocol from IETF. We investigate the use of mSCTP for seamless vertical handoff without any change in IP protocol stack by its multi‐homing feature and dynamic address reconfiguration (DAR) extension. We evaluate the performance of mSCTP and MIP by introducing handoff delay, end‐to‐end transmission throughput, and packet loss, and verify our observations by a simulation study of the two protocols in UMTS/802.11b integrated networks using NS‐2 network simulator. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Editorial: Special Issue on “Increasing Efficiency in Broadband Fixed Wireless Access Systems: From Physical to Network Layer Solutions”

Editorial: Special Issue on “Increasing Efficiency in Broadband Fixed Wireless Access Systems: From Physical to Network Layer Solutions”

An architecture and implementation toward multiprotocol mobility

The challenge is to design a set of protocols that provide seamless and robust network connectivity to mobile users for a variety of existing network protocol suites. An important additional constraint is that the design should not require any changes to the existing stationary infrastructure and it should interoperate with the existing protocol stacks at the stationary hosts. We propose a mobile data link (MDL) architecture that endeavors to meet this design challenge. The architecture hides the topological effects of mobility at the data link layer, thus making topology changes due to mobility transparent at layers above the data link. This provides a single mechanism to support a variety of distributed applications that use different protocol stacks without requiring changes to the implementations of the stacks. Further, the-solution provides the enhanced degree of mobility provided by prior network layer solutions. The novel features of the proposed solution are the use of the network layer infrastructure for carrying data link traffic, the ability to dynamically maintain a data link overlay over a common network layer infrastructure, and efficient handling of the broadcast traffic. We have developed an MDL architecture that allows data link networks (formed by the interconnection of LAN segments by bridges) to be dynamic, thereby supporting mobile hosts, eliminating the need for manual configuration. Moreover, our scheme efficiently handles broadcasts and multicasts.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>