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We present a simple argument using Promise Theory and dimensional analysis for the Dunbar scaling hierarchy, supported by recent data from group formation in Wikipedia editing. We show how the assumption of a common priority seeds group alignment until the costs associated with attending to the group outweigh the benefits in a detailed balance scenario. Subject to partial efficiency of implementing promised intentions, we can reproduce a series of compatible rates that balance growth with entropy.

Human communities have self-organizing properties in which specific Dunbar Numbers may be invoked to explain group attachments. By analyzing Wikipedia editing histories across a wide range of subject pages, we show that there is an emergent coherence in the size of transient groups formed to edit the content of subject texts, with two peaks averaging at around $N=8$ for the size corresponding to maximal contention, and at around $N=4$ as a regular team. These values are consistent with the observed sizes of conversational groups, as well as the hierarchical structuring of Dunbar graphs. We use the Promise Theory model of bipartite trust to derive a scaling law that fits the data and may apply to all group size distributions, when based on attraction to a seeded group process. In addition to providing further evidence that even spontaneous communities of strangers are self-organizing, the results have important implications for the governance of the Wikipedia commons and for the security of all online social platforms and associations., Comment: Expanded method section and changed the title to be more specific and informative

The current Internet lacks quality-of-service guarantees for real-time applications like video calls and gaming, cloud-based systems, financial transactions, telesurgery, and other remote applications that benefit from reliable communication. To address this problem, this paper introduces Hummingbird: a novel, lightweight bandwidth-reservation system that provides fine-grained inter-domain reservations for end hosts and introduces several improvements over previous designs. Hummingbird enables flexible and composable reservations with end-to-end guarantees, and addresses an often overlooked, but crucial, aspect of bandwidth reservation systems: incentivization of network providers. Hummingbird represents bandwidth reservations as tradeable assets which allows markets to emerge that ensure fair and efficient resource allocation and encourage deployment by remunerating providers. This incentivization is facilitated by decoupling reservations from network identities, which enables novel control-plane mechanisms and allows us to design a control plane based on smart contracts. Hummingbird also provides an efficient reservation data plane which streamlines the processing on routers and thus simplifies the implementation, deployment, and traffic policing while maintaining robust security properties., Comment: 20 pages, 15 figures

As a part of this project, we have developed an IoT-based instrument utilizing the NODE MCU-ESP8266 module, MQ135 gas sensor, and DHT-11 sensor for measuring CO$_2$ levels in parts per million (ppm), temperature, and humidity. The escalating CO$_2$ levels worldwide necessitate constant monitoring and analysis to comprehend the implications for human health, safety, energy efficiency, and environmental well-being. Thus, an efficient and cost-effective solution is imperative to measure and transmit data for statistical analysis and storage. The instrument offers real-time monitoring, enabling a comprehensive understanding of indoor environmental conditions. By providing valuable insights, it facilitates the implementation of measures to ensure health and safety, optimize energy efficiency, and promote effective environmental monitoring. This scientific endeavor aims to contribute to the growing body of knowledge surrounding CO$_2$ levels, temperature, and humidity, fostering sustainable practices and informed decision-making, Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures

By combining the security features of TLS with the reliability of TCP, QUIC opens new possibilities for many applications. We demonstrate the benefits that QUIC brings for routing protocols. Current Internet routing protocols use insecure transport protocols. BGP uses TCP possibly with authentication. OSPF uses its own transport protocol above plain IP. We design and implement a library that allows to replace the transport protocols used by BGP and OSPF with QUIC. We apply this library to the BIRD routing daemon and report preliminary results., Comment: 2 pages, 1 figure, NSDI '23 Poster Session

This article shows a brief history of Techno-Economic Assessment (TEA) in Communications, a proposed redefinition of TEA as well as the new challenges derived from a dynamic context with cloud-native virtualized networks, the Helium Network & alike blockchain-based decentralized networks, the new network as a platform (NaaP) paradigm, carbon pricing, network sharing, and web3, metaverse and blockchain technologies. The authors formulate the research question and show the need to improve TEA models to integrate and manage all this increasing complexity. This paper also proposes the characteristics TEA models should have and their current degree of compliance for several use cases: 5G and beyond, software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN), secure access service edge (SASE), secure service edge (SSE), and cloud cybersecurity risk assessment. The authors also present TEA extensibility to request for proposals (RFP) processes and other industries, to conclude that there is an urgent need for agile and effective TEA in Comms that allows industrialization of agile decision-making for all market stakeholders to choose the optimal solution for any technology, scenario and use case., Comment: 18 pages, 1 figure, 2 tables

The Swapped Dragonfly with M routers per group and K global ports per router is denoted D3(K;M) [1]. It has n=KMM routers and is a partially populated Dragonfly. A Swapped Dragonfly with K and M restricted is studied in this paper. There are four cases. matrix product: If K is a perfect square, a matrix product of size n can be performed in squareroot n rounds. all-to-all exchange: If K and M have a common factor s, an all-to-all exchange can be performed in n/s rounds. broadcast: If D3(K,M) is equipped with a synchronized source-vector header it can perform x broadcast in 3x/M rounds. ascend-descend: If K and M are powers of 2 an ascend-descend algorithm can be performed at twice the cost of the algorithm on a Boolean hypercube of size n. In each case the algorithm on the Swapped Dragonfly is free of link conflicts and is compared with algorithms on a hypercube as well as on the fully populated Dragonfly. The results on the Swapped Dragonfly are more applicable than the special cases because D3(K,M) contains emulations of every Swapped Dragonfly with J less than equal to K and/or L less than or equal to M. Keywords: Swapped Interconnection Network, Matrix Product, All-to-all, Universal Exchange, Boolean Hypercube, Ascend-descend algorithm, Broad- cast, Edge-disjoint spanning tree. References [1] R. Draper. The Swapped Dragonfly , ArXiv for Computer Science:2202.01843. 1, Comment: 8 pages

In the last 15 years, the Internet architecture has continued evolving organically, introducing new headers and protocols to the classic TCP/IP stack. More specifically, we have identified two major trends. First, it is common that most communications are encrypted, either at L3 or L4. And second, due to protocol ossification, developers have resorted to upper layers to introduce new functionalities (L4 and above). For example, QUIC's connection migration feature provides mobility at L4. In this paper we present a reflection around these changes, and attempt to formalize them by adding two additional protocol headers to the TCP/IP stack: one for security, and another for new functionalities. We must note that we are not presenting a new architecture, but trying to draw up what it's already out there. In addition, we elaborate on the forces that have brought us here, and we enumerate current proposals that are shaping these new headers. We also analyze in detail three examples of such trends: the Zero Trust Networking paradigm, the QUIC transport protocol, and modern SD-WAN systems. Finally, we present a formalization of this architecture by adding these two additional layers to the TCP/IP protocol stack. Our goal is triggering a discussion on the changes of the current Internet architecture., Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures

This paper is a summary of the findings from a series of workshops which were held by Thinknet 6G and MUENCHNER KREIS in 2021, with the goal to provide orientation and input for developing a strategic 6G research plan. The topics selected for the workshops are aspects of 6G that we expect will have a significant impact on other industries and on society: - 6G as both a communication infrastructure and a sensing infrastructure - The extensive use of artificial intelligence in 6G - The security and resilience of 6G This paper does not go into the technical details of how to develop and implement 6G. Rather, it provides input from experts from both the wireless industry as well as from other sectors about (mostly) non-technical topics that will need to be addressed in parallel with the technical developments, such as new use cases, regulation, communication with the public, and cross-industry cooperation. We have identified six areas that will have a significant impact on the development and use of 6G, and that organizations must consider as they begin their plans and designs for 6G. Based on these six impact areas and on the discussion in the workshops, we compiled a list of the top 10 recommendations for specific areas where organizations should place their focus when developing their strategic plan for 6G. In addition, for our readers who are involved in 6G research, be it at a university, at a research institute or in industrial research, we also included a summary of the top 10 areas that require additional research, again based on the input received in the workshops. A version of this paper is also available at www.thinknet-6g.de. If you had a copy of the preview version of this paper, the text is exactly the same. Only the layout and graphics have changed., Comment: 20 pages, 1 figure

This paper describes the Swapped Dragonfly. It is a two-parameter family of diameter three interconnection networks, D3(K,M), which are linearly scalable in M. Although D3(K,M) is a Dragonfly, it differs from standard Dragonflies in many respects. It has a K by M by M coordinate system (c;d; p). The routers (c,d,p) and (c',p,d) are globally connected using a swap of p and d. If L < K and/or N < M, D3(K;M) contains D3(L,N). The coordinate system enables source vector routing on D3(K,M). A source-vector induces KM squared parallel paths on D3(K,M). Because of this, the Swapped Dragonfly can support conflict-free parallelism over local ports, global ports, routers and source-vectors. In particular, there is an all-to-all algorithm which is not a pairwise exchange algorithm. Keywords: interconnection network, Dragonfly network, swapped network, source-vector routing, all-to-all exchange, Comment: 20 pages 3 figures

Although 5G (Fifth Generation) mobile technology is still in the rollout phase, research and development of 6G (Sixth Generation) wireless have already begun. This paper is an introduction to 6G wireless networks, covering the main drivers for 6G, some of the expected use cases, some of the technical challenges in 6G, example areas that will require research and new technologies, the expected timeline for 6G development and rollout, and a list of some important 6G initiatives world-wide. It was compiled as part of a series of workshops about 6G held by Thinknet 6G and MUENCHNER KREIS in 2021., Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, document also available in German, document available in a more attractive format, here: www.thinknet-6g.de

BGP-Multipath (BGP-M) is a multipath routing technique for load balancing. Distinct from other techniques deployed at a router inside an Autonomous System (AS), BGP-M is deployed at a border router that has installed multiple inter-domain border links to a neighbour AS. It uses the equal-cost multi-path (ECMP) function of a border router to share traffic to a destination prefix on different border links. Despite recent research interests in multipath routing, there is little study on BGP-M. Here we provide the first measurement and a comprehensive analysis of BGP-M routing in the Internet. We extracted information on BGP-M from query data collected from Looking Glass (LG) servers. We revealed that BGP-M has already been extensively deployed and used in the Internet. A particular example is Hurricane Electric (AS6939), a Tier-1 network operator, which has implemented >1,000 cases of BGP-M at 69 of its border routers to prefixes in 611 of its neighbour ASes, including many hyper-giant ASes and large content providers, on both IPv4 and IPv6 Internet. We examined the distribution and operation of BGP-M. We also ran traceroute using RIPE Atlas to infer the routing paths, the schemes of traffic allocation, and the delay on border links. This study provided the state-of-the-art knowledge on BGP-M with novel insights into the unique features and the distinct advantages of BGP-M as an effective and readily available technique for load balancing., Comment: 38 pages, 8 figures, 8 tables

Providing multi-connectivity services is an important goal for next generation wireless networks, where multiple access networks are available and need to be integrated into a coherent solution that efficiently supports both reliable and non reliable traffic. Based on virtual network interfaces and per path congestion controlled tunnels, the MP-DCCP based multiaccess aggregation framework presents as a novel solution that flexibly supports different path schedulers and congestion control algorithms as well as reordering modules. The framework has been implemented within the Linux kernel space and has been tested over different prototypes. Experimental results have shown that the overall performance strongly depends upon the congestion control algorithm used on the individual DCCP tunnels, denoted as CCID. In this paper, we present an implementation of the BBR (Bottleneck Bandwidth Round Trip propagation time) congestion control algorithm for DCCP in the Linux kernel. We show how BBR is integrated into the MP-DCCP multi-access framework and evaluate its performance over both single and multi-path environments. Our evaluation results show that BBR improves the performance compared to CCID2 for multi-path scenarios due to the faster response to changes in the available bandwidth, which reduces latency and increases performance, especially for unreliable traffic. the MP-DCCP framework code, including the new CCID5 is available as OpenSource.

The present paper shows a proposal of the characteristics Cloud Risk Assessment Models should have and presents the review of the literature considering those characteristics in order to identify current gaps. This work shows a ranking of Cloud RA models and their degree of compliance with the theoretical reference Cloud Risk Assessment model. The review of literature shows that RA approaches leveraging CSA (Cloud Security Alliance) STAR Registry that have into account organizations security requirements present higher degree of compliance, but they still lack risk economic quantification. The myriad of conceptual models, methodologies and frameworks although based on current NIST SP 800:30, ISO 27001, ISO 27005, ISO 30001, ENISA standards could be enhanced by the use of techno-economic models like UTEM, created by the author, in order to conceive more simplified models for effective Risk Assessment and Mitigation closer to the theoretical reference model for Cloud Risk Assessment, available for all cloud models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) and easy to use for all stakeholders., Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables

This paper proposes the characteristics a techno-economic model for 5G should have considering both mobile network operators perspective and end users needs. It also presents a review and classification of models in the literature based on the characteristics of such theoretical techno-economic reference model. The performed analysis identifies current gaps in the techno-economic modeling literature for 5G architectures and shows it can be enhanced using agile techno-economic models like the Universal Techno-Economic Model (UTEM) created and developed by the author to industrialize assessment of different technological solutions, considering all market players perspectives and applicable to decision-making in multiple domains. This model can be used for an effective and agile 5G techno-economic assessment, including not only network deployment perspective but also customers and end users requirements as well as other stakeholders to select the most adequate 5G architectural solution considering both technical and economic feasibility. UTEM model is currently available for all industry stakeholders under specific license of use., Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, 1 table

The respiratory viral diseases, such as those caused by the family of coronaviruses, can be extremely contagious and spread through saliva droplets generated by coughing, sneezing, or breathing. In humans, the most common symptoms of the infection include fever and difficulty in breathing. In order to reduce the diffusion of the current "Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)" pandemic, the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies can play an important role; for instance, they can be effectively used for implementing a real-time patient tracking and warning system at a city scale. Crucial places to install the tracking IoT devices are the public/private vehicles that, augmented with multiple connectivity solutions, can implement the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) paradigm. In such a ubiquitous network environment, vehicles are equipped with a variety of sensors, including regular cameras that can be replaced with thermal cameras. Therefore, this paper proposes a new design for widely detecting respiratory viral diseases that leverages IoV to collect real-time body temperature and breathing rate measurements of pedestrians. This information can be used to recognize geographic areas affected by possible COVID-19 cases and to implement proactive preventive strategies that would further limit the spread of the disease., Comment: 12 pages, 11 figures, Accepted for publication in Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies (ETT)

This doctoral dissertation shows State of the Art of techno-economic modeling for access network technologies, presents the characteristics a universal techno-economic model should have, and shows a classification and analysis of techno-economic models in the literature based on such characteristics. In order to reduce the gap detected in the literature, the author defines and develops a Universal Techno-Economic Model called UTEM and the corresponding methodology to industrialize techno-economic assessment in multiple domains considering all market players perspectives, also suitable for technological consulting and currently available for all industry stakeholders under specific license of use., Comment: 188 pages, 30 figures, 56 tables, PhD Thesis, delivered in Dec. 2015, defended in Feb. 2016. Confidential chapters 3 and 4 excluded. English Translation. Original in Spanish available at University of the Basque Country official repository: https://addi.ehu.es/handle/10810/24669 *Total Spanish + English versions: 382 pages in arXiv: 2008.07286v3

This article shows State of the Art of techno-economic modeling for access network technologies, presents the characteristics a universal techno-economic model should have, and shows a classification and analysis of techno-economic models in the literature based on such characteristics. As a result of his research in this direction, the author created and developed a Universal Techno-Economic Model and the corresponding methodology for techno-economic assessment in multiple domains, currently available for industry stakeholders under specific licence of use., Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure, 4 tables

Model-Free Control (MFC), which is easy to implement both from software and hardware viewpoints, permits the introduction of a high level control synthesis for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and the Industry 4.0. The choice of the User Diagram Protocol (UDP) as the Internet Protocol permits to neglect the latency. In spite of most severe packet losses, convincing computer simulations and laboratory experiments show that MFC exhibits a good Quality of Service (QoS) and behaves better than a classic PI regulator., Comment: 28th Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation (MED'2020), 16-19 June, 2020 -- Saint-Rapha\"{e}l, France

Due to the advancement of IoT devices in both domestic and industrial environments, the need to incorporate a mechanism to build accountability in the IoT ecosystem is paramount. In the last few years, various initiatives have been started in this direction addressing many socio-technical concerns and challenges to build an accountable system. The solution that has received a lot of attention in both industry and academia is the Manufacturer Usage Description (MUD) specification. It gives the possibility to the IoT device manufacturers to describe communications needed by each device to work properly. MUD implementation is challenging not only due to the diversity of IoT devices and manufacturer/operator/regulators but also due to the incremental integration of MUD-based flow control in the already existing Internet infrastructure. To provide a better understanding of these challenges, in this work, we explore and investigate the prototypes of three implementations proposed by different research teams and organisations, useful for the community to understand which are the various features implemented by the existing technologies. By considering that there exist some behaviours which can be only defined by local policy, we propose a MUD capable network integrating our User Policy Server(UPS). The UPS provides network administrators and endusers an opportunity to interact with MUD components through a user-friendly interface. Hence, we present a comprehensive survey of the challenges., Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, WIP

IP spoofing enables reflection and amplification attacks, which cause major threats to the current Internet infrastructure. Detecting IP packets with incorrect source addresses would help to improve the situation. This is easy at the attacker's network, but very challenging at Internet eXchange Points (IXPs) or in transit networks. In this reproducibility study, we revisit the paper \textit{Detection, Classification, and Analysis of Inter-Domain Traffic with Spoofed Source IP Addresses} published at ACM IMC 2017. Using data from a different IXP and from a different time, we were not able to reproduce the results. Unfortunately, our further analysis reveals structural problems of the state of the art methodology, which are not easy to overcome., Comment: Extended version of a poster presented at ACM IMC 2019

There is a strong devotion in the automotive industry to be part of a wider progression towards the Fifth Generation (5G) era. In-vehicle integration costs between cellular and vehicle-to-vehicle networks using Dedicated Short Range Communication could be avoided by adopting Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) technology with the possibility to re-use the existing mobile network infrastructure. More and more, with the emergence of Software Defined Networks, the flexibility and the programmability of the network have not only impacted the design of new vehicular network architectures but also the implementation of V2X services in future intelligent transportation systems. In this paper, we define the concepts that help evaluate software-defined-based vehicular network systems in the literature based on their modeling and implementation schemes. We first overview the current studies available in the literature on C-V2X technology in support of V2X applications. We then present the different architectures and their underlying system models for LTE-V2X communications. We later describe the key ideas of software-defined networks and their concepts for V2X services. Lastly, we provide a comparative analysis of existing SDN-based vehicular network system grouped according to their modeling and simulation concepts. We provide a discussion and highlight vehicular ad-hoc networks' challenges handled by SDN-based vehicular networks., Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, Sensors 2019

IP protocol is the core of TCP/IP network layer. However, since IP address and its Domain Name are allocated and managed by a single agency, there are risks of centralization. The semantic overload of IP address also reduces its scalability and mobility, which further hinders the security. This paper proposes a co-governing Multi-Identifier Network (MIN) architecture that constructs a network layer with parallel coexistence of multiple identifiers, including identity, content, geographic information, and IP address. On the management plane, we develop an efficient management system using consortium blockchain with voting consensus, so the network can simultaneously manage and support by hundreds or thousands of nodes with high throughput. On the data plane, we propose an algorithm merging hash table and prefix tree (HTP) for FIB, which avoids the false-negative error and can inter-translate different identifiers with tens of billions of entries. Further, we propose a scheme to transport IP packets using CCN as a tunnel for supporting progressive deployment. We deployed the prototype of MIN to the largest operators' network in Mainland China, Hongkong and Macao, and demonstrated that the network can register identifier under co-governing consensus algorithm, support VoD service very well., Comment: 13 pages

Ad-hoc social networks (ASNETs) represent a special type of traditional ad-hoc network in which a user's social properties (such as the social connections and communications metadata as well as application data) are leveraged for offering enhanced services in a distributed infrastructureless environments. However, the wireless medium, due to limited bandwidth, can easily suffer from the problem of congestion when social metadata and application data are exchanged among nodes---a problem that is compounded by the fact that some nodes may act selfishly and not share its resources. While a number of congestion control schemes have been proposed for the traditional ad-hoc networks, there has been limited focus on incorporating social awareness into congestion control schemes. We revisit the existing traditional ad-hoc congestion control and data distribution protocols and motivate the need for embedding social awareness into these protocols to improve performance. We report that although some work is available in opportunistic network that uses socially-aware techniques to control the congestion issue, this area is largely unexplored and warrants more research attention. In this regards, we highlight the current research progress and identify multiple future directions of research., Comment: 29 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in a future issue of the Future Generation Computer Systems

In this paper, Decentralized Periodic Approach for Adaptive Fault Diagnosis (DP-AFD) algorithm is proposed for fault diagnosis in distributed systems with arbitrary topology. Faulty nodes may be either unresponsive, may have either software or hardware faults. The proposed algorithm detects the faulty nodes situated in geographically distributed locations. This algorithm does not depend on a single node or leader to detect the faults in the system. However, it empowers more than one node to detect the fault-free and faulty nodes in the system. Thus, at the end of each test cycle, every fault-free node acts as a leader to diagnose faults in the system. This feature of the algorithm makes it applicable to any arbitrary network. After every test cycle of the algorithm, all the nodes have knowledge about faulty nodes and each node is tested only once. With this knowledge, there can be redistribution of load, which was earlier assigned to the faulty nodes. Also, the algorithm permits repaired node re-entry and new node entry. In a system of n nodes, the maximum number of faulty nodes can be (n-1) which is detected by DP-AFD algorithm. DP-AFD is periodic in nature which executes test cycles after regular intervals to detect the faulty nodes in the given distributed system., Comment: 19 pages, 13 figures, 1 table

Data center networks are an important infrastructure in various applications of modern information technologies. Note that each data center always has a finite lifetime, thus once a data center fails, then it will lose all its storage files and useful information. For this, it is necessary to replicate and copy each important file into other data centers such that this file can increase its lifetime of staying in a data center network. In this paper, we describe a large-scale data center network with a file d-threshold policy, which is to replicate each important file into at most d-1 other data centers such that this file can maintain in the data center network under a given level of data security in the long-term. To this end, we develop three relevant Markov processes to propose two effective methods for assessing the file lifetime and data security. By using the RG-factorizations, we show that the two methods are used to be able to more effectively evaluate the file lifetime of large-scale data center networks. We hope the methodology and results given in this paper are applicable in the file lifetime study of more general data center networks with replication mechanism., Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures

The current internet architecture is inefficient in fulfilling the demands of newly emerging internet applications. To address this issue, several over-the-top (OTT) application-level solutions have been employed, making the overall architecture very complex. Information-centric-networking (ICN) architecture has emerged as a promising alternative solution. The ICN architecture decouples the content from the host at the network level and supports the temporary storage of content in an in-network cache. Fundamentally, the ICN can be considered a multisource, multicast content-delivery solution. Because of the benefits of network coding in multicasting scenarios and proven benefits in distributed storage networks, the network coding is apt for the ICN architecture. In this study, we propose a solvable linear network-coding scheme for the ICN architecture. We also propose a practical implementation of the network-coding scheme for the ICN, particularly for the content-centric network (CCN) architecture, which is termed the coded CCN (CCCN). The performance results show that the network-coding scheme improves the performance of the CCN and significantly reduces the network traffic and average download delay., Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in a future issue of the IEEE systems Journal

The Network Function Virtualization paradigm is attracting the interest of service providers, that may greatly benefit from its flexibility and scalability properties. However, the diversity of possible orchestrated services, rises the necessity of adopting specific orchestration strategies for each service request that are unknown a priori. This paper presents Senate, a distributed architecture that enables precise orchestration of heterogeneous services over a common edge infrastructure. To assign shared resources to service orchestrators, Senate uses the Distributed Orchestration Resource Assignment (DORA), an approximation algorithm that we designed to guarantee both a bound on convergence time and an optimal (1-1/e)-approximation with respect to the Pareto optimal resource assignment. We evaluate advantages of service orchestration with Senate and performance of DORA through a prototype implementation.

The use of secure connections using HTTPS as the default means, or even the only means, to connect to web servers is increasing. It is being pushed from both sides: from the bottom up by client distributions and plugins, and from the top down by organisations such as Google. However, there are potential technical hurdles that might lock some clients out of the modern web. This paper seeks to measure and precisely quantify those hurdles in the wild. More than three million measurements provide statistically significant evidence of degradation. We show this through a variety of statistical techniques. Various factors are shown to influence the problem, ranging from the client's browser, to the locale from which they connect.

Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is widely used for management of Internet-based network today. In Lisp community, there're large Lisp-based applications which may need be monitored, and there're Lispers who may need to monitor other remote systems which are either Lisp-based or not. However, the relationship between Lisp and SNMP haven't been studied enough during past 20 years. The cl-net-snmp project has developed a new Common Lisp package which implemented the SNMP protocol. On client side, it can be used to query remote SNMP peers, and on server side, it brings SNMP capability into Common Lisp based applications, which could be monitored from remote through any SNMP-based management system. It's also a flexible platform for researches on network management and SNMP itself. But the most important, this project tries to prove: Common Lisp is the most fit language to implement SNMP. Different from other exist SNMP projects on Common Lisp, cl-net-snmp is clearly targeted on full SNMP protocol support include SNMPv3 and server-side work (agent). During the development, an general ASN.1 compiler and runtime package and an portable UDP networking package are also implemented, which would be useful for other related projects. In this paper, the author first introduces the SNMP protocol and a quick tutorial of cl-net-snmp on both client and server sides, and then the Lisp native design and the implementation details of the ASN.1 and SNMP package, especially the "code generation"' approach on compiling SNMP MIB definitions from ASN.1 into Common Lisp., Comment: 10 pages; reprinted from ILC '09, Proceedings of the International Lisp Conference, March 22-25, 2009, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

In this survey, we give an extensive overview on honeypots. This includes not only honeypot software but also methodologies to analyse honeypot data.

The detection of BGP prefix hijacking attacks has been the focus of research for more than a decade. However, state-of-the-art techniques fall short of detecting more elaborate types of attack. To study such attacks, we devise a novel formalization of Internet routing, and apply this model to routing anomalies in order to establish a comprehensive attacker model. We use this model to precisely classify attacks and to evaluate their impact and detectability. We analyze the eligibility of attack tactics that suit an attacker's goals and demonstrate that related work mostly focuses on less impactful kinds of attacks. We further propose, implement and test the Hijacking Event Analysis Program (HEAP), a new approach to investigate hijacking alarms. Our approachis designed to seamlessly integrate with previous work in order to reduce the high rates of false alarms inherent to these techniques. We leverage several unique data sources that can reliably disprove malicious intent. First, we make use of an Internet Routing Registry to derive business or organisational relationships between the parties involved in an event. Second, we use a topology-based reasoning algorithm to rule out events caused by legitimate operational practice. Finally, we use Internet-wide network scans to identify SSL/TLS-enabled hosts, which helps to identify non-malicious events by comparing public keys prior to and during an event. In our evaluation, we prove the effectiveness of our approach, and show that day-to-day routing anomalies are harmless for the most part. More importantly, we use HEAP to assess the validity of publicly reported alarms. We invite researchers to interface with HEAP in order to cross-check and narrow down their hijacking alerts.

Recent Internet interconnection disputes have sparked an in- creased interest in developing methods for gathering and collecting data about utilization at interconnection points. One mechanism, developed by DeepField Networks, allows Internet service providers (ISPs) to gather and aggregate utilization information using network flow statistics, standardized in the Internet Engineering Task Force as IPFIX. This report (1) provides an overview of the method that DeepField Networks is using to measure the utilization of various interconnection links between content providers and ISPs or links over which traffic between content and ISPs flow; and (2) surveys the findings from five months of Internet utilization data provided by seven participating ISPs---Bright House Networks, Comcast, Cox, Mediacom, Midco, Suddenlink, and Time Warner Cable---whose access networks represent about 50% of all U.S. broadband subscribers. The dataset includes about 97% of the paid peering, settlement-free peering, and ISP-paid transit links of each of the participating ISPs. Initial analysis of the data---which comprises more than 1,000 link groups, representing the diverse and substitutable available routes---suggests that many interconnects have significant spare capacity, that this spare capacity exists both across ISPs in each region and in aggregate for any individual ISP, and that the aggregate utilization across interconnects interconnects is roughly 50% during peak periods.

Wide-area network traffic engineering enables network operators to reduce congestion and improve utilization by balancing load across multiple paths. Current approaches to traffic engineering can be modeled in terms of a routing component that computes forwarding paths, and a load balancing component that maps incoming flows onto those paths dynamically, adjusting sending rates to fit current conditions. Unfortunately, existing systems rely on simple strategies for one or both of these components, which leads to poor performance or requires making frequent updates to forwarding paths, significantly increasing management complexity. This paper explores a different approach based on semi-oblivious routing, a natural extension of oblivious routing in which the system computes a diverse set of paths independent of demands, but also dynamically adapts sending rates as conditions change. Semi-oblivious routing has a number of important advantages over competing approaches including low overhead, nearly optimal performance, and built-in protection against unexpected bursts of traffic and failures. Through in-depth simulations and a deployment on SDN hardware, we show that these benefits are robust, and hold across a wide range of topologies, demands, resource budgets, and failure scenarios., Comment: 23 pages, 13 figures. USENIX NSDI 2018

Supermarket models with different servers become a key in modeling resource management of stochastic networks, such as, computer networks, manufacturing systems and transportation networks. While these different servers always make analysis of such a supermarket model more interesting, difficult and challenging. This paper provides a new novel method for analyzing the supermarket model with different servers through a multi-dimensional continuous-time Markov reward processes. Firstly, the utility functions are constructed for expressing a routine selection mechanism that depends on queue lengths, on service rates, and on some probabilities of individual preference. Then applying the continuous-time Markov reward processes, some segmented stochastic integrals of the random reward function are established by means of an event-driven technique. Based on this, the mean of the random reward function in a finite time period is effectively computed by means of the state jump points of the Markov reward process, and also the mean of the discounted random reward function in an infinite time period can be calculated through the same event-driven technique. Finally, some simulation experiments are given to indicate how the expected queue length of each server depends on the main parameters of this supermarket model., Comment: 35 pages, 4 figures in International Journal of Simulation and Process Modelling; 2016

Since GNU/Linux became a popular operating system on computer network routers, its packet routing mechanisms attracted more interest. This does not only concern 'big' Linux servers acting as a router but more and more small and medium network access devices, such as DSL or cable access devices. Although there are a lot of documents dealing with high performance routing with GNU/Linux, only a few offer experimental results to prove the given advices. This study evaluates the throughput performance of Linux' routing subsystem netfilter under various conditions like different data transport protocols in combination with different IP address families and transmission strategies. Those conditions were evaluated with two different types of netfilter rules for a high number in the rule tables. In addition to this, our experiments allowed us to evaluate two prominent client connection handling techniques (threads and the epoll() facility). The evaluation of the 1.260 different combinations of our test parameters shows a nearly linear but small throughput loss with the number of rules which is independant from the transport protocol and framesize. However, this evaluation identifies another issue concerning the throughput loss when it comes to the address family, i.e. IPv4 and IPv6., Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures, 1 table

The use of TLS proxies to intercept encrypted traffic is controversial since the same mechanism can be used for both benevolent purposes, such as protecting against malware, and for malicious purposes, such as identity theft or warrantless government surveillance. To understand the prevalence and uses of these proxies, we build a TLS proxy measurement tool and deploy it via Google AdWords campaigns. We generate 15.2 million certificate tests across two large-scale measurement studies. We find that 1 in 250 TLS connections are TLS-proxied. The majority of these proxies appear to be benevolent, however we identify over 3,600 cases where eight malware products are using this technology nefariously. We also find numerous instances of negligent, duplicitous, and suspicious behavior, some of which degrade security for users without their knowledge. Distinguishing these types of practices is challenging in practice, indicating a need for transparency and user awareness.

This paper explores the feasibility, advantages, and challenges of an ICN-based approach in the Internet of Things. We report on the first NDN experiments in a life-size IoT deployment, spread over tens of rooms on several floors of a building. Based on the insights gained with these experiments, the paper analyses the shortcomings of CCN applied to IoT. Several interoperable CCN enhancements are then proposed and evaluated. We significantly decreased control traffic (i.e., interest messages) and leverage data path and caching to match IoT requirements in terms of energy and bandwidth constraints. Our optimizations increase content availability in case of IoT nodes with intermittent activity. This paper also provides the first experimental comparison of CCN with the common IoT standards 6LoWPAN/RPL/UDP., Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures and tables, ACM ICN-2014 conference

Basically information means selection within a domain (value or definition set) of possibilities. For objectifiable, comparable and precise information the domain should be the same for all. Therefore the global (online) definition of the domain is proposed here. It is advantageous to define an ordered domain, because this allows using numbers for addressing the elements and because nature is ordered in many respects. The original data can be ordered in multiple independent ways. We can define a domain with multiple independent numeric dimensions to reflect this. Because we want to search information in the domain, for quantification of similarity we define a distance function or metric. Therefore we propose "Domain Spaces" (DSs) which are online defined nestable metric spaces. Their elements are called "Domain Vectors" (DVs) and have the simple form: URL (of common DS definition) plus sequence of numbers At this the sequence must be given so that the mapping of numbers to the DS dimensions is clear. By help of appropriate software DVs can be represented e.g. as words and numbers. Compared to words, however, DVs have (as original information) important objectifiable advantages (clear definition, objectivity, information content, range, resolution, efficiency, searchability). Using DSs users can define which information they make searchable and how it is searchable. DSs can be also used to make quantitative (numeric) data as uniform DVs interoperable, comparable and searchable. The approach is demonstrated in an online database with search engine (http://NumericSearch.com). The search procedure is called "Numeric Search". It consists of two systematic steps: 1. Selection of the appropriate DS e.g. by conventional word based search within the DS definitions. 2. Range and/or similarity search of DVs in the selected DS., Comment: 36 pages, 20 figures

Vehicular safety applications intended for VANETs. It can be separated by inter-vehicle communication. It is needed for a vehicle can travel safety with high velocity and must interconnect quickly dependably. In this work, examined the impact of the IDM-IM and IDM-LC mobility model on AODV, AOMDV, DSDV and OLSR routing protocol using Nakagami propagation model and IEEE 802.11p MAC protocol in a particular urban scenario of Dhaka city. The periodic broadcast (PBC) agent is employed to transmit messages between vehicles in case of emergency or collision avoidance for vehicular safety communication. The simulation results recommend numerous concerns such as lower packet drop rate, delay, jitter, route cost and mean-hop is necessary to be measured before developing a robust safety application of VANET., Comment: 6 pages, 9 figures, ICIEV 2014

The IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) was recently introduced as the new routing standard for the Internet of Things. Although RPL defines basic security modes, it remains vulnerable to topological attacks which facilitate blackholing, interception, and resource exhaustion. We are concerned with analyzing the corresponding threats and protecting future RPL deployments from such attacks. Our contributions are twofold. First, we analyze the state of the art, in particular the protective scheme VeRA and present two new rank order attacks as well as extensions to mitigate them. Second, we derive and evaluate TRAIL, a generic scheme for topology authentication in RPL. TRAIL solely relies on the basic assumptions of RPL that (1) the root node serves as a trust anchor and (2) each node interconnects to the root as part of a hierarchy. Using proper reachability tests, TRAIL scalably and reliably identifies any topological attacker without strong cryptographic efforts.

At present Internet has emerged as a country's predominant and viable data communication infrastructure. The Autonomous System (AS) resources which are building blocks of the Internet are AS numbers, IPv4 and IPv6 Prefixes. AS number growth is one of Internet infrastructure development indicators. Hence understanding on long term trend and stochastic variation behaviour are essential to detect significant events during the growth. In this work, time series based approximation is considered for mathematical modelling and forecast the yearly AS growth. The AS data of five countries namely India, China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are extracted from APNIC archive. ARIMA models with different Auto Regressive and Moving Average parameters are identified for forecasting. Model validation, parameter estimation, point forecast and prediction intervals with 95 % confidence levels for the five countries are reported in the paper. The significant level change in variations, positive growth percentage in Inter Annual Absolute Variations (IAAV) and higher percentage of advertised ASes when compared to other countries indicate India's fast growth and wider global reachability of Internet infrastructure from 2007 onwards. The correlation between IAAV change point and GDP growth period indicates that service sector industry growth is the driving force behind significant yearly changes., Comment: 22 pages, 15 figures

Mobile nodes, in particular smartphones are one of the most relevant devices in the current Internet in terms of quantity and economic impact. There is the common believe that those devices are of special interest for attackers due to their limited resources and the serious data they store. On the other hand, the mobile regime is a very lively network environment, which misses the (limited) ground truth we have in commonly connected Internet nodes. In this paper we argue for a simple long-term measurement infrastructure that allows for (1) the analysis of unsolicited traffic to and from mobile devices and (2) fair comparison with wired Internet access. We introduce the design and implementation of a mobile honeypot, which is deployed on standard hardware for more than 1.5 years. Two independent groups developed the same concept for the system. We also present preliminary measurement results.

Information-centric networking proposals attract much attention in the ongoing search for a future communication paradigm of the Internet. Replacing the host-to-host connectivity by a data-oriented publish/subscribe service eases content distribution and authentication by concept, while eliminating threats from unwanted traffic at an end host as are common in today's Internet. However, current approaches to content routing heavily rely on data-driven protocol events and thereby introduce a strong coupling of the control to the data plane in the underlying routing infrastructure. In this paper, threats to the stability and security of the content distribution system are analyzed in theory and practical experiments. We derive relations between state resources and the performance of routers and demonstrate how this coupling can be misused in practice. We discuss new attack vectors present in its current state of development, as well as possibilities and limitations to mitigate them., Comment: 15 pages

Source-controlled routing has been proposed as a way to improve flexibility of future network architectures, as well as simplifying the data plane. However, if a packet specifies its path, this precludes fast local re-routing within the network. We propose SlickPackets, a novel solution that allows packets to slip around failures by specifying alternate paths in their headers, in the form of compactly-encoded directed acyclic graphs. We show that this can be accomplished with reasonably small packet headers for real network topologies, and results in responsiveness to failures that is competitive with past approaches that require much more state within the network. Our approach thus enables fast failure response while preserving the benefits of source-controlled routing., Comment: This is the full version of a paper with the same title that appeared in ACM SIGMETRICS 2011, with the inclusion of the appendix. 16 pages

Name-oriented networks introduce the vision of an information-centric, secure, globally available publish-subscribe infrastructure. Current approaches concentrate on unicast-based pull mechanisms and thereby fall short in automatically updating content at receivers. In this paper, we argue that an inclusion of multicast will grant additional benefits to the network layer, namely efficient distribution of real-time data, a many-to-many communication model, and simplified rendezvous processes. These aspects are comprehensively reflected by a group-oriented naming concept that integrates the various available group schemes and introduces new use cases. A first draft of this name-oriented multicast access has been implemented in the HAMcast middleware.

Static analysis (aka offline analysis) of a model of an IP network is useful for understanding, debugging, and verifying packet flow properties of the network. There have been static analysis approaches proposed in the literature for networks based on model checking as well as graph reachability. Abstract interpretation is a method that has typically been applied to static analysis of programs. We propose a new, abstract-interpretation based approach for analysis of networks. We formalize our approach, mention its correctness guarantee, and demonstrate its flexibility in addressing multiple network-analysis problems that have been previously solved via tailor-made approaches. Finally, we investigate an application of our analysis to a novel problem -- inferring a high-level policy for the network -- which has been addressed in the past only in the restricted single-router setting., Comment: 8 pages

We report on our experience on multidimensional aspects of our faculty's network design and management, including some unique aspects such as campus-wide VLANs and ghosting, security and monitoring, switching and routing, and others. We outline a historical perspective on certain research, design, and development decisions and discuss the network topology, its scalability, and management in detail; the services our network provides, and its evolution. We overview the security aspects of the management as well as data management and automation and the use of the data by other members of the IT group in the faculty., Comment: 19 pages, 11 figures, TOC and index; a short version presented at C3S2E'11; v6: more proofreading, index, TOC, references

Denial of Service (DoS) attacks frequently happen on the Internet, paralyzing Internet services and causing millions of dollars of financial loss. This work presents NetFence, a scalable DoS-resistant network architecture. NetFence uses a novel mechanism, secure congestion policing feedback, to enable robust congestion policing inside the network. Bottleneck routers update the feedback in packet headers to signal congestion, and access routers use it to police senders' traffic. Targeted DoS victims can use the secure congestion policing feedback as capability tokens to suppress unwanted traffic. When compromised senders and receivers organize into pairs to congest a network link, NetFence provably guarantees a legitimate sender its fair share of network resources without keeping per-host state at the congested link. We use a Linux implementation, ns-2 simulations, and theoretical analysis to show that NetFence is an effective and scalable DoS solution: it reduces the amount of state maintained by a congested router from per-host to at most per-(Autonomous System)., Comment: The original paper is published in SIGCOMM 2010

In this article we propose a method for measuring internet connection stability which is fast and has negligible overhead for the process of its complexity. This method finds a relative value for representing the stability of internet connections and can also be extended for aggregated internet connections. The method is documented with help of a real time implementation and results are shared. This proposed measurement scheme uses HTTP GET method for each connections. The normalized responses to identified sites like gateways of ISPs, google.com etc are used for calculating current link stability. The novelty of the approach is that historic values are used to calculate overall link stability. In this discussion, we also document a method to use the calculated values as a dynamic threshold metric. This is used in routing decisions and for load-balancing each of the connections in an aggregated bandwidth pipe. This scheme is a very popular practice in aggregated internet connections., Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures