Autoconfiguration for IP networking: enabling local communication

IP hosts and network infrastructure have historically been difficult to configure, requiring network services such as DHCP and DNS servers, and relying on highly trained network administrators. This need for administration has prevented IP networks from being used in many environments such as in homes, in small businesses, in impromptu networks established at conferences, construction sites, emergency relief stations, etc. With the proliferation of IP-enabled network-attached appliances and inexpensive computing devices, the demand to enable plug-and-play, easy-to-use IP networking has increased. This demand has initiated a new paradigm of IP networking called zero configuration, or zeroconf, networking. The goal is to develop a set of zeroconf configuration protocols to enable IP networking without manual configuration or administration. Such IP networks are called zeroconf networks. We examine IP address configuration in zeroconf networks involving two network topologies: (1) A routerless network, which consists of several hosts attached to a segment having no router, (2) A single-router network, which consists of a router joining several segments together into a star-shaped topology. We suggest the requirements for IP address configuration, review the existing solutions, and propose new algorithms to address their deficiencies. Finally, we present a comparison of our algorithms to existing solutions and describe when a particular configuration method should be used.

The security of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), the standard routing protocol for inter-domain routing in the Internet, has been an increasingly intent focus of concern for many years. In the last few years, the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) has undertaken several efforts to specify security solutions for BGP. The IETF has chartered work to analyze BGP vulnerabilities, to investigate threat models for routing protocols in general, and to specify requirements for BGP security. Most recently, the IETF has begun work on securing the origination of prefix advertisements. Unauthorized origination of prefix advertisements has been the most frequent root cause of publicly noted routing incidents for the history of the Internet. Also, authorization of origination of prefix advertisements is the common basis to almost all suggested security solutions. Because the Global Information Grid (GIG) uses BGP for inter-domain routing and VPN provisioning just as the commercial Internet, the GIG is subject to the same BGP vulnerabilities. Security solutions to the vulnerabilities of BGP should be deployed and used in the GIG, in order to protect the GIG routing system internally and at interconnection points to the Internet. It is important that the GIG be aware of standards based security solutions and be involved in the development of new standards. This paper discusses the current status of BGP security standards, how they are evolving, and how the security of BGP relates to the GIG.

The technology we choose to create: Human rights advocacy in the Internet Engineering Task Force

This paper presents the architecture of a policy-based network management system designed specifically for quality of service management, where high level business policies are modeled as ECA (event-condition-action) rules. Specifically, the system is mainly based on the policy architecture being proposed by the IETF (Internet engineering task force), DMTF (distributed management task force), and TMF (telemanagement forum) standardization bodies. This work proposes a novel approach for policy condition evaluation using fuzzy logic. The fuzzy controller has the ability to examine policy conditions differently from default condition analyzers that employ simple conditions formed by a set of (IFs, ANDs and ORs), allowing the consideration and correlation of several input variables before taking decisions for the execution of policy actions. The system have been implemented and evaluated over a test bed network formed by Ciscoreg routers

The convergence of operational and information technologies in the industry requires a new generation of IP-compliant communication protocols that can meet the industrial performance requirements while facilitating the integration with novel web-based supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. For more than a decade, the industry has relied on time-slotted channel hopping (TSCH) communication technology to meet these performance requirements through standards such as WirelessHART and ISA100.11a. TSCH-based networks have proven to yield over 99.999% end-to-end reliability, supporting flow isolation and QoS management while ensuring over a decade of battery lifetime. However, these technologies were designed to address the factory use cases of a decade ago, not considering IP compliance or standardized network management and resource orchestration as a must. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the 6TiSCH working group (WG) have been actively working on this challenge by designing protocols to bridge the performance of industrial solutions with IP-compliant networks. The effort has resulted in 6TiSCH, a set of specifications that define the IPv6 control plane to manage and orchestrate a TSCH network. 6TiSCH provides the missing elements for zero-configuration TSCH network bootstrap, efficient network access authentication, and distributed and modular scheduling mechanisms. As a cross-layer effort, 6TiSCH leverages and integrates other IETF specifications and the WG has also driven the definition of novel specifications in other IETF WGs. An ultimate goal of this effort is the definition of a fully functional architecture where a combination of IETF protocols enables the envisioned convergence on top of the IEEE industrial standard. This paper introduces the work done by the 6TiSCH WG at IETF, evaluates the performance of the reference implementation, and discusses the 6TiSCH software ecosystem.

This paper reports the results of an exploratory study on the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) specifications corpus in relation to the changes in volume, structure, and production of Internet standards. Using data spanning three decades, the authors examine changes in the production volume and type composition of IETF documents, their interdependency, and the level of collaboration involved in their production. Longitudinal changes in the standards corpus exhibit an increasing trend in interdependency, number of refinement steps, and number of authors, and additionally reveal that standards production is of an episodic nature with regular peaks in output volume. Complementary analysis on the network structure of dependencies highlights a trend toward compartmentalization of the system over the years involving the emergence of relatively isolated subsystems of related standards. The authors suggest that a perspective which considers a system like IETF as an organization itself, rather than a constellation of extra-organizational activities, is needed to understand and manage standardization processes like this one.

This paper introduces a new model dedicated to the Internet of Thing that interacts with active RFIDs. Instead of targeting IP stacks implementation in tags, we plan to support the Host Identity Protocol, which dissociates IP address and host location and that has been recently defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). We propose an architecture, in which a PORTAL entity realizes the bridge between classical IP world (compatible with the EPCglobal infrastructure) and HIP domains, dealing with a constellation of readers and tags.

Soft Phone is a VoIP soft phone that uses the Session Initiation Protocol. It is a powerful and unique SIP software telephone that lets users make phone and video calls using single software application using any Voice over IP (VoIP) telephony provider. As a fully featured SIP client, Soft Phone is designed from the ground up to work with current and future IP-based. Soft phone can be used in the place where we need establish the voice and video phone calls in the IP network. This can be installed at any personal computer. It uses the SIP protocol to establish the IP session and using RTP, RTCP and RTSP for media transmission. Using Soft phone they make call to any Soft Phone and Physical hardware SIP phone which can understand the SIP protocol.In computing, a soft phone is a software program for making telephone calls over the Internet using a general purpose computer, rather than using dedicated hardware. A soft phone is usually used with a headset connected to the sound card of the PC. To communicate, both end-points must have the same communication protocol and at least one common audio code. Many service providers use the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)

We developed two wireless multi-hop localization games, i.e., a war game and a tag game, based on classical field games. The proposed games are played using mobile game consoles with ad-hoc networking capabilities. The fundamental concept underlying a wireless multihop localization game is that players on a team establish an ad-hoc network to estimate their positions and then compete for positioning accuracy with other teams obtained using a multihop localization technique. Using simulation, we found that node velocity and obstruction positions were parameters to control the win rate for the war game. In the tag game, the higher connectivity constraint led to be surviving longer. The simulations demonstrated that the win rate for the proposed games depends on obstruction positions and connectivity constraint. We also demonstrated that introducing a design parameter and enforcing local rules were needed to control the win rate for the game. The results demonstrated that the proposed games worked well as games with ad-hoc networking capabilities. In this work, we simply assumed that nodes had random motion to investigate the primitive operations of proposed wireless multi-hop localization games. In the real world, players

Depleting IPv4 addresses has generated enormous interest in the new version of Internet Protocol, IPv6. It was developed by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to completely replace IPv4. However, due to many reasons, migration to the new version of the Internet has been slow. For the interim, various transition mechanisms have been developed. This research examines and empirically evaluates the performance of two such transition mechanisms, namely 6to4 and configured tunnel when implemented on network infrastructure. Performance metrics like throughput, jitter and delay are measured for these transition mechanisms. This research shows that 6to4 transition mechanism gives better network performance than configured tunnel.

Overviews the challenging 5-year process leading to the design, specification, and implementation of the Internet, Engineering Task Force (IETF) Intrusion Detection Working Group (IDWQ) Intrusion Exchange Protocol (IDXP). IDXP seeks to facilitate the ubiquitous interoperability of intrusion detection components across Internet enterprises. This capability is a critical enabler of successful intrusion detection for large networks. The IETF IDWG was inspired by the DARPA CIDF activity. IDXP was developed and demonstrated in recent IETF meetings and in the IEEE DISCEX (DARPA Information Survivability Conference and EXposition). In the future, we intend to incorporate event correlation into IDXP. The process of achieving technical and organizational consensus among the segmented communities that comprise the information assurance community has been exceedingly challenging. The paper addresses the driving factors for this situation, and analyses the reasons for the ultimate community success in getting the process on the road. It is hoped that this experience would be useful in other technical disciplines facing large collaborative challenges within large secure distributed environments.

The changing role of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard setting process, from designing and implementing the best effort transmission control protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) as a universal standard towards a platform for dealing with the increasing need for variety in the design of a Quality of Service (QoS) differentiated traffic management architecture, is demonstrated. The IETF's contributions to flexible open transmission architecture, able to provide the required traffic qualities for the different applications, constitute the relevant pillars of a Generalized Differentiated Service (DiffServ) architecture. Further, the role of entrepreneurial traffic management within the Generalized DiffServ architecture, and the division of labor between the IETF and entrepreneurial traffic management, is analyzed. Within the “umbrella” architecture of Generalized DiffServ with the potential to combine basic elements of QoS differentiated traffic architectures, a flexible framework for entrepreneurial traffic quality differentiation strategies is evolving. Its basic characteristic is market-driven network neutrality with all applications bearing the opportunity costs of their required traffic capacities. Consequently, an artificial market split between best effort TCP/IP and managed services would conflict with the integrated service approach of the IETF. Finally, the implementation of Generalized DiffServ via Next Generation Networks is considered.

Chapter 16 - The IP Multimedia Subsystem: True Converged Communications

With the continuing growth of data communications — and especially the Internet and its integration with telecommunications — security matters have become increasingly important. In particular, the development of high-speed packet data communications over air interfaces and their folding into the overall converged networks present an ever increasing set of security issues for major network providers and for enterprise (information technology) environments as well. International and national standards bodies have thus focused on a broad range of subjects applicable to security. Over time, these major standards bodies have become interdependent. In this paper, we address the major efforts of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) through Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC 1) and also the efforts of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). We undertake specifically to explain the interdependence of efforts undertaken by these organizations, whose work defines the direction in the international data and telecommunications security standards in a significant way.

The work described in this Ph.D. thesis has been carried out within the context of computer networks and real-time multimedia applications over the Internet. Specifically, we focus on conferencing, a challenging service which experienced a wide growth during the last years. We examine the standardization efforts conducted in this field by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which are mainly focused on centralized conferencing as defined by the XCON Working Group. We actively contributed to such efforts by designing and implementing the defined framework and protocols, while also writing best current practice documents which are on the path to become Request For Comments (RFCs). The main outcome of such activities has been Meetecho, a standards-compliant multimedia conferencing and collaboration platform we developed. Meetecho has been conceived at the outset to be extensible towards a distributed architecture, yet being fully compliant with the XCON specification, in order to better fulfill scalability requirements resulting from its large-scale deployment. The distributed architecture, which is the subject of the DCON (Distributed Conferencing) proposal we submitted to the IETF, is thoroughly described herein, where we also provide the reader with the results of a scalability analysis we conducted in order to assess the actual performance improvement attainable with distribution. The figures obtained have been encouraging and definitely motivated us in pushing our proposal into the Internet standardization community. Finally, a remarkable part of this dissertation is focused on diagnosing and addressing issues that might arise when deploying multimedia architectures in the actual Internet.