Programmable Network Environment Research Articles

Entropy-based distributed denial of service attack detection in software-defined networking

Software defined networking (SDN) is a new network architecture that allows for centralized network control. The separation of the data plane from the control plane, which establishes a programmable network environment, is the key breakthrough underpinning SDN. The controller facilitates the deployment of services that specify control policies and delivers these rules to the data plane using a common protocol such as OpenFlow at the control plane. Despite the many advantages of this design, SDN security remains a worry because the aforementioned chapter expands the network's attack surface. In fact, denial of service (DoS) assaults pose a significant threat to SDN settings in a variety of ways, owing to flaws in the data and control layers. This work shows how distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack detection is based on the entropy variation of the destination IP address. The study takes advantage of the OpenFlow protocol's (OFP) flexibility and an OpenFlow controller (POX) to apply the proposed method. An entropy computation to determine the distributed features of DDoS traffic is developed and it is capable of detecting a user datagram protocol (UDP) flood attack after 0.445 seconds this type of attack occurred.

Real-time experimental demonstration of DSP-enabled soft-ROADMs with multi-level flexible add/drop functions for cloud access networks.

Making use of digital filtering, drop RF signal-driven intensity modulation and passive optical coupling, DSP-enabled flexible ROADMs, termed soft-ROADMs, are experimentally demonstrated in real-time, which are free from both optical filters and O-E-O conversions and are inherently transparent to major network design characteristics. In a 4-channel IMDD optical network node incorporating FPGA-based orthogonal digital filter multiplexing, fully real-time soft-ROADM dynamic add and drop operations at both sub-wavelength and spectrally overlapped orthogonal sub-band levels are extensively, experimentally explored, along with their performance robustness against condition variations of practical networks associated with low-cost optical/electrical components. It is shown that the soft-ROADMs introduce optical power penalties as low as 1.4dB for add operation and 2dB for drop operation. For received optical powers fixed at -10dBm, the add operation can tolerate a differential optical input dynamic range of 6.5dB (1.5dB) for sub-wavelength (sub-band) add operation. On the other hand, robust drop operation performances are obtainable over a ~5dB (16°) drop RF signal amplitude (phase) variation range. This work is a significant milestone in demonstrating the technical feasibility of utilising soft-ROADMs to create a programmable networking environment capable of addressing elastic 5G slicing and the SDN paradigm.

Locating resources in a programmable networking environment

Programmable networking is a technology that has been demonstrated to enable the rapid deployment of novel network services. This is achieved through the use of open interfaces that can be used to extend the functionality of a device by third-party service components. Some forms of programmable network allow such components to be deployed out-of-band on a suitable configuration of elements, but do not define mechanisms to determine the configuration.We present a mechanism to resolve arbitrary service-specific deployment constraints into a suitable node configuration. To focus constraint resolution, we arrange programmable elements into an overlay, and use this to interpolate/extrapolate more favourable locations. Programmable service components are used to evaluate the suitability of individual nodes.

Autonomic service deployment in networks

Networks have been growing dramatically in size and functionality in past years. Internet Protocol network nodes not only forward datagrams using longest-prefix matching of the destination address, but also execute functions based on dynamic policies such as proxy-caching, encryption, tunneling, and firewalling. More recently, programmable behaviors have begun to appear in network elements, allowing experimentation with even more sophisticated services. This paper presents an autonomic approach to network service deployment that scales to large heterogeneous networks. Topological categories of service deployment are introduced. A two-phase deployment mechanism that is split into hierarchically distributed and central computations is presented and illustrated with examples of actual services in a programmable network environment, together with their deployment algorithms and simulation results. Autonomic service deployment allows the distributed and complex capabilities present in network elements to be leveraged more efficiently when installing new services than is possible in traditional centralized network management-based approaches. As a result, installation is faster and use of functional resources is more optimized.

Open Signaling for ATM Networks: A Vexed Question of Performance

Based on a clear separation between switching hardware and control software, the concept of open signaling creates an open programmable networking environment in which network entities can be realized as high level software objects with well-defined interfaces. This underlying architecture facilitates the creation of multiple mechanisms of network control, supporting applications for connection management. The feasibility of a connection management framework however depends mainly on the performance of CORBA because of binding overheads associated with remote invocations. It has been proposed that an implementation with reasonable performance may require certain criteria to be integrated into the design, including caching of network states, aggregation of access to the switch server object, and parallel processing of a single call request. This paper considers the effectiveness of these design criteria and the associated performance issues of a connection management system for ATM networks.

The Tempest-a practical framework for network programmability

The Tempest framework provides a programmable network environment by allowing the dynamic introduction and modification of network services at two levels of granularity. First, the switchlet and associated virtual network concepts enable the safe introduction of alternative control architectures into an operational network. The timescales over which such new control architectures can be introduced might vary from, for example, a video conferencing specific control architecture, which is active only for the duration of the conference, to a new version of a general purpose control architecture, which might be active for several months or longer. Second, the Tempest framework allows refinement of services at a finer level of granularity by means of the connection closure concept. In this case modification of services can be performed at an application-specific level. These attributes of the Tempest framework allows service providers to effectively become network operators for some well defined partition of the physical network. This enables them to take advantage of the knowledge they possess about how the network resources are to be used, by programming their own specially tailored control architecture. This, as our work with the Tempest shows, is a spur to creativity allowing many of the constraints imposed on operators and end users to be rethought and for new techniques to be quickly and safely introduced into working networks.

Programming telecommunication networks

The move toward market deregulation and open competition has sparked a wave of serious introspection in the telecommunications service industry. Telecom providers and operators are now required to open up their primary revenue channels to competing industries. The competition for product differentiation increasingly depends on the level of sophistication, degree of flexibility, and speed of deployment of services that a future provider can offer. These factors in turn depend heavily on the flexibility of the software architecture in place in a provider's operational infrastructure. Within this context, we examine the service architecture of two major global communication networks-the telephone network and the Internet and explore their weaknesses and strengths. We discuss the realization of an open programmable networking environment based on a new service architecture for advanced telecommunication services that overcomes the limitations of the existing networks. Our approach to network programmability stems from two angles-one conceptual, the other implementational. In the first, we attempt to develop a service model that is open and reflects the economic market structure of the future telecommunications service industry. Furthermore, we introduce an extended reference model for realizing the service marketplace and present it as a vehicle for creating multimedia services with QoS guarantees. In the second, we investigate the feasibility of engineering the reference model from an implementation standpoint. We describe a realization of the open programmable networking environment as a broadband kernel. Called xbind, the broadband kernel incorporates IP and CORBA technologies for signaling, management, and service creation, and ATM for transport. We also address some of the important QoS, performance, scalability, and implementation issues.