Ultra-Low Latency Networking Research Articles

Ultra-low latency networks and bridging the digital divide between Russian Federation regions

Research subject. The article is devoted to the analysis of the 
 apabilities of telecommunication networks with ultra low latency to reduce the digital divide between the regions of the Russian Federation. Method. Systemic and technical and economic analysis. Core results. Determination of communication networks as the basis for reducing the digital divide, establishing the relationship between the Gross Regional Product and the share of employees in the field of informatization and communications, typing of the territories of the Russian Federation according to the possibilities of introducing communication network services with ultra low delays. Practical relevance. The results of the article can be used in the implementation of the digital economy program, scientific and design organizations in the planning and design of communication networks, as well as by universities in the educational process.

A Flow-based Multi-agent Data Exfiltration Detection Architecture for Ultra-low Latency Networks

Modern network infrastructures host converged applications that demand rapid elasticity of services, increased security, and ultra-fast reaction times. The Tactile Internet promises to facilitate the delivery of these services while enabling new economies of scale for high fidelity of machine-to-machine and human-to-machine interactions. Unavoidably, critical mission systems served by the Tactile Internet manifest high demands not only for high speed and reliable communications but equally, the ability to rapidly identify and mitigate threats and vulnerabilities. This article proposes a novel Multi-Agent Data Exfiltration Detector Architecture (MADEX), inspired by the mechanisms and features present in the human immune system. MADEX seeks to identify data exfiltration activities performed by evasive and stealthy malware that hides malicious traffic from an infected host in low-latency networks. Our approach uses cross-network traffic information collected by agents to effectively identify unknown illicit connections by an operating system subverted. MADEX does not require prior knowledge of the characteristics or behavior of the malicious code or a dedicated access to a knowledge repository. We tested the performance of MADEX in terms of its capacity to handle real-time data and the sensitivity of our algorithm’s classification when exposed to malicious traffic. Experimental evaluation results show that MADEX achieved 99.97% sensitivity, 98.78% accuracy, and an error rate of 1.21% when compared to its best rivals. We created a second version of MADEX, called MADEX level 2, that further improves its overall performance with a slight increase in computational complexity. We argue for the suitability of MADEX level 1 in non-critical environments, while MADEX level 2 can be used to avoid data exfiltration in critical mission systems. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first article in the literature that addresses the detection of rootkits real-time in an agnostic way using an artificial immune system approach while it satisfies strict latency requirements.

Evolutionary Algorithms for 5G Multi-Tier Radio Access Network Planning

With the ever-increasing traffic demand of wireless users, resulting from the huge deployment of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices and the emergence of smart city applications requiring ultra-low latency networks, the Fifth Generation (5G) of cellular networks have been introduced as a revolutionary broadband technology to boost the quality of service of mobile users. In this paper, we investigate the planning process for a 5G radio access network having mmWave Micro Remote Radio Units (mRRUs) on top of sub-6 GHz Macro Remote Radio Units (MRRUs). We rely on proper channel models and link budgets as well as Urban Macro-cells (UMa) and Urban Micro-cells (UMi) characteristics to carefully formulate a 5G network planning optimization problem. We aim to jointly determine the minimum number of MRRUs and mRRUs to install and find their locations in a given geographical area while fulfilling coverage and user traffic demand constraints. In order to solve this planning process, we propose a two-step process where we first employ a low complexity meta-heuristic algorithm to optimize the locations of RRUs followed by an iterative elimination method to remove redundant cells. To evaluate the performances of this proposed approach, we conduct a comparative study using Accelerated Particle Swarm Optimization and Simulated Annealing. Simulations results using sub-6 GHz UMa and 28 GHz UMi demonstrate the ability of the proposed planning approach to achieve more than 98% coverage with minimum cell capacity outage rate, not exceeding the 2%, for different scenarios and illustrate the efficiency of the evolutionary algorithms in solving this NP-hard problem in reasonable running time.

Formullar: An FPGA-based network testing tool for flexible and precise measurement of ultra-low latency networking systems

As network systems become widespread in emerging time-sensitive domains, latency becomes an important performance factor. Thus, there is a new demand for ultra-low latency (ULL), which requires an extra-ordinarily low latency even in a deterministic manner. To support the ULL requirement, it is mandatory that each network device strictly guarantees this latency. As a result, there is an increasing demand for a precise latency measurement tool that achieves two conflicting goals: high time precision and flexible traffic control. To support these goals, this paper proposes a novel measurement tool, named Formullar, which has a hybrid architecture composed of hardware (Formullar FPGA) and software (Formullar controller) layers. Formullar generates packets in an accurate timing, according to the various traffic patterns. The packet generation is controlled in a fully programmable manner that makes the testing fully automated and flexible. Then, latency is measured based on packet generation and reception timing; the measurement is done by the hardware layer, providing highly precise measurement results. Using this carefully constructed system, a Formullar prototype was implemented on top of the commodity FPGA board NetFPGA-SUME. The evaluation indicates that Formullar provides highly precise measurements with nanoseconds precision at a bandwidth of 10 Gbps.

A TestBed for Deployment of Datacenter Switches for Training Purposes

Today’s network industry needs highly qualified engineers to understand, configure, develop and upgrade switches that can build scalable high performance and ultra-low latency networks. This paper describes a new networking laboratory that has been set up to provide hands-on experience on datacenter network switches, such as ARISTA, programming and monitoring the traffic. This paper explains the networking laboratory coursework that students carry out during the course of a semester. The laboratory consists of six hands on experiments on the latest datacenter switches from Arista Networks, two programming assignments that teaches some of the protocols used at data link layer and routing protocols used at the network layer of OSI reference model. The final two laboratory experiments use the Wireshark software tool for traffic monitoring and peeking into details of some of the protocols in TCP/IP such as ARP protocol, Ethernet and so forth. The coursework details include the switch basics, switch hardware, Extensible Operating System (EOS), configuration of Link Aggregation Control Protocol, Multi-chassis Link Aggregation Protocol, Access Control Lists, and Open Short Path First version 2 on Arista switches 7050T-64 and 7048T-4S. The programming tasks cover High-level Data Link Control (HDLC) and Routing Algorithms.

LATENCY REDUCTION IN VLSI ROUTERS

This paper presents recent results on the MP1 router chip designed to implement scalable parallel computers. We survey design considerations used in order to reduce message delivery latency to a minimum. Results will be presented of simulations of the MP1 network which back up these considerations. It will be shown that there are many degrees of freedom in implementation and that implementation issues will often overwhelm other considerations, those on which simulation is focused, leading to anomalous predictions from those results. An example will be given on this. Even ultra-low latency networks will still have access times to remote data which are 10 to 100 times that for access to local data and architectures which tolerate low latency data-access must be exploited if scalable performance is to be obtained in these parallel machines based on networks.