Internet acceleration with LISP traffic engineering and multipath TCP

Future Communication Infrastructure (FCI) air ground data link services can use various technologies (radio links) to achieve the end to end data exchange objectives. Such functionality has been developed and standardized by ICAO under the Aeronautical Telecommunication Network (ATN) activities and is also available in the Internet Protocol Suite (IPS) world, but is currently not yet operationally deployed for ATM purposes. Work comprised in SESAR P15.2.4 project provides an initial perspective of the “Multi Link Operational Concept”, i.e. the notion of using multiple data links to support the communication exchanges in the context of the future SESAR concept of operations. In the context of this task the perimeter of the FCI is limited to just the three future technologies (LDACS, AeroMACS, and SATCOM) and the ATN/IPS-based network layer. This contribution introduces LISP (Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol) as novel approach in order to enhance the ATN/IPS-based network layer. LISP is an open IETF RFC [5] describing a solution for the scalability problem of the Internet routing caused mainly by provider independent addresses and multi-homing of customer networks to different Internet service providers. The concept is based on the separation of the device identity from the physical device location in an IP network. The current approach in the IP world is overloading of IP semantics. Who and where are both represented by the same IP address. Change of location leads to a different IP address and hence changes identity causing existing sessions to be interrupted. LISP is a network-based solution supporting seamless communication while allowing roaming between different locations. LISP is an incrementally deployable architectural upgrade to anexisting infrastructure. An interesting application is the seamless migration from IPv4 to IPv6 due to its address family agnostic behavior. Early adopters will be able to use their existing infrastructure and applications and immediately benefit from LISP. This paper focuses on usage of LISP technology in aeronautical networks in order to achieve mobility, high availability and security for safety critical communication between aircraft and ground infrastructures. Fast convergence, make-before break in multilink environments, easy deployment and operation, manageable security, avoidance of scalability limits and independence of service provider infrastructure are the main topics of interest. Typical use cases demonstrate the network power of LISP support both, future aeronautical data, and voice applications. This makes LISP an interesting candidate technology to handle the mobility of the aircraft while maintaining communications when moving between different ground stations. We show how the LISP mobility system can be enhanced to include application type or QoS specific information into the data link selection. This allows path preference selection for individual data transactions transparent to the application and implementation of outgoing traffic engineering whilst utilizing the basic LISP mechanisms. Finally we discuss make-before break handover in order to improve required communication performance (RCP) figures such as availability of use or continuity.

Stub autonomous systems usually utilize multiple links to single or multiple ISPs. Today, inbound traffic engineering is considered hard, as there is no direct way to influence routing decisions on remote systems with BGP. Current traffic engineering methods built on top of BGP are heuristic and time-consuming. The Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) promises to change that. In this paper, we conduct the first comprehensive evaluation of LISP and its built-in traffic engineering methods on a real-world testbed. First, we compare LISP to plain BGP and BGP advertising more specific prefixes. This comparison shows that LISP allows effective load-balancing with an accuracy of approximately 5%, while being easier to configure than BGP and its variants. Further experiments show that these results are independent from the number of concurrent streams.

The Locator Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) has been proposed as an identifier-locator separation scheme for scalable Internet routing. However, LISP was originally designed in the fixed network environment rather than in the mobile network environment. In particular, the existing LISP mobility schemes are based on a centralized map server that is used as an anchor point for mobile nodes, and thus intrinsically subject to some limitations in mobile environment. In this paper, we propose a distributed mapping management of Endpoint Identifiers (EIDs) and Locators (LOCs) in mobile LISP networks. We use Routing LOC (RLOC) and Local LOC (LLOC) as locators for mobile hosts. RLOC represents the IP address of the domain gateway, and LLOC is the IP address of the access router that a host is currently attached to. For EID-LOC mapping management, each network domain has a Distributed Map Server (DMS) over its gateway. Each DMS keeps track of the EID-LOC mapping information for mobile hosts in the distributed way. The proposed scheme is also a network-based approach, in which each access router, instead of a host, performs the mapping management operations. From the performance analysis, we can see that the proposed distributed scheme can give better performance than the existing schemes in terms of the signaling delays required for EID-LOC mapping update and query operations.

The development and deployment of the Locator/ Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP), a paradigm introducing several benefits to the Internet architecture, is becoming widespread thanks to initiatives like the LISP-Lab project. Yet, LISP remains a relatively recent technology, hence, its actual performance when integrated with the current Internet remains still to be assessed. To tackle this issue we leverage on RIPE Atlas, the largest existing Internet measurement infrastructure, in order to provide a thorough analysis of the obtained performance as well as guidelines on where there is still margin for improvement. The preliminary experimental results show that LISP has quite a stable performance, compared with the existing Internet. Nevertheless, from our vantage point we observe that performance strongly depends on geographical position. For instance, when using LISP, we observe a non-negligible latency increase for destinations not far away, while for destinations at intercontinental distance, there is a slight decrease in the observed latency.

By utilizing a new network protocol, Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP), a global IP multicasting system can be achieved without modifying protocol stacks of routers on the Internet. A mapping system which manages relationship between each multicast group and the group members is a core component of the system, but the centralized system requires costly resources for handling a large-scale network. In this study, a new decentralized mapping system for LISP- based information multicasting system is proposed. The proposed system utilizes a structured P2P network consisting of LISP routers to manage the membership information of multicast groups, and collaborates with two proximity-aware methods in order to shorten the start-up time needed for newly-arrived multicast members to start communicating with other members. The first method enables LISP routers to connect to lower- latency neighbors, and the second one replicates the membership information on a router which is close to all group members. This paper considers the performance of the proposed system by using a large-scale computer simulation and clarifies that the proposed mapping system with both methods can halve the start- up time compared with the simple P2P-based system.

One of the challenges in managing mobility in a heterogeneous network domain remains a significant challenge in Software-Defined Networking (SDN). While SDN has effectively facilitated intra-domain mobility, inter-domain mobility has been a major issue, leading to service interruptions, packet loss, and unstable communication sessions. This article presents a new concept in mobility management: a hybrid SDN-LISP network that facilitates inter-domain communication by integrating SDN with the Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP). The main idea is to introduce a new event-based orchestration model that uses OpenFlow Packet-In messages to provide instantaneous updates to Endpoint Identifiers-to-Routing Locators (EID-to-RLOC) mappings, unlike traditional LISP, which relies on timers for updates. The proposed framework has been implemented and evaluated on a Mininet-WiFi testbed under various mobility conditions. The results obtained from the experimental evaluation reveal that packet loss is reduced by 92.32% when using the proposed framework over the conventional SDN Mobility approach. Although there is a slight increase in jitter overhead due to LISP encapsulation of 0.628 ms, the framework does not compromise Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) session continuity. In addition, the control plane synchronization time is also minimized to 277.5 ms. This reveals that the proposed framework is a stable mobility solution that does not depend on any conventional IP mobility solutions and can be used in future network environments requiring seamless inter-domain connectivity.

The BGP routing system today faces a serious scaling problem caused by the linear growth of the global routing table. To overcome the routing table explosion, the IETF is in the process of standardizing a new routing protocol, called Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP). The protocol is expected to shrink the routing table size by orders of magnitude. However, its deployment relies on the performance of the Map cache function that maintains bindings of locators and identifiers. In this paper, we emulate the Map cache function and evaluate its performance when deployed in large ISPs using real packet level traffic traces. Our measurement results show that LISP has the potential to decrease the routing table size by several orders of magnitude. We also show that small percentage of cache entries carry large volume of traffic and that majority of the cache entries are poorly utilized.

With the increase in mobile devices there is also an increase in demand for IP mobility across networks. Although not created for that purpose, the LISP protocol offers a clean solution for mobility, via an end-to-end map/encap scheme. The solution offered by LISP allows a mobile device to keep its IP address even when changing networks. LISP’s mobility method, however, breaks when the mobile device does not have access to a publicly routable IP address, which is to be expected in today’s NAT dominated world. The LISP proposed NAT traversal solution suffers from suboptimal routing and unnecessary provider dependance. This has two major effects: increased latency, which is especially worrisome on short lived connections, and worse performance due to extended reconfiguration time during mobility events. In this paper we propose an alternative NAT traversal mechanism for LISP, by adding LISP functionality to the NAT device. The evaluations performed, by simulation and over a proof of concept prototype, show that both hindrances may be suppressed. Additionally, our experience shows that, at least for a mobile device, the LISP control plane is uselessly overburdening. Keywords: LISP – locator identifier separation protocol, LISP mobile node, Locator / identifier split, Map-Encap, Mobile IP, NAT- network address translation, NAT traversal routing.

The Internet has been created for interconnecting few hundreds networks, but is now close to one billion hosts, grouped in 40,000 Autonomous Systems, using more than 400,000 prefixes. Such a situation raises scalability issues that have driven both academia and industry to review the current Internet Architecture in the light of the Locator/Identifier Split paradigm. In particular, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has adopted and is actively designing and developing the Locator/ID Separation Protocol (LISP). However, changing the routing and addressing architecture of the Internet in an incrementally deployable manner Several constraints impact such a design. We use LISP as reference to describe the different design choices necessary to achieve deployability, which is the ultimate goal of any new Future Internet architecture. Furthermore, we showcase several alternate usages of LISP, which go beyond improving the Internet scalability.

Multipath TCP (MPTCP) is a backward compatible extension of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) designed to let an application send data over several TCP connections, usually called subflows. MPTCP presents several opportunities over legacy TCP, especially when these subflows follow disjoint paths: for instance bandwidth aggregation or seamless mobility across networks. While MPTCP is built as an extension of TCP, the scope of the modifications qualifies it almost as a new protocol. This means traditional TCP tools are not enough to analyze MPTCP performance. We thus develop and present an open source application able to analyze MPTCP specific metrics such as the aggregated goodput or inter-subflow retransmissions.

Reducing traffic burstiness for MPTCP in data center networks

Multipath Transmission Control Protocol (MPTCP) is an approach towards high-throughput and efficient load balancing over multiple paths. Each of paths forms a TCP connection with an IP address, and those can be implemented as multiple network interfaces or multiple ports within a network interface. In this paper, we focus on the multiple network interfaces environment. Each network interface with an IP address is called as a subflow. A subflow is a TCP connection which can have a different internet path identified by IP addresses of source and destination network interfaces. To control these multiple subflows, MPTCP supports many options. Specifically, to establish a new subflow, MPTCP uses an <monospace>ADD&#x005F;ADDR</monospace> option. A host sends <monospace>ADD&#x005F;ADDR</monospace> option to inform another host of its IP address, and then, the host receiving <monospace>ADD&#x005F;ADDR</monospace> option tries to establish a subflow at the address of <monospace>ADD&#x005F;ADDR</monospace> option. However, by forging the <monospace>ADD&#x005F;ADDR</monospace> option, an attacker can create a fake subflow that passes through itself and eventually hijack the connection between both end hosts. In a previous study, Hash-based Message Authentication (HMAC) was added to the <monospace>ADD&#x005F;ADDR</monospace> option, preventing it from being forged. Nevertheless, since the keys for generating HMAC can be leaked during three-way handshake, a variant of the <monospace>ADD&#x005F;ADDR</monospace> attack called the persistent <monospace>ADD&#x005F;ADDR</monospace> attack can be possible. To this end, we propose a protocol that can prevent the <monospace>ADD&#x005F;ADDR</monospace> attacks by backward confirmation of the <monospace>ADD&#x005F;ADDR</monospace> option without encryption. The main idea of our proposal is to apply a digital signature scheme for the backward confirmation. We show security analysis for the proposed protocol and compare with the previous studies in terms of time/space overheads.

It is common to find multiple network interfaces connected to different Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in devices such as smartphones. Multipath TCP (MPTCP) enables TCP connections to use all these network interfaces in a single TCP connection in an application transparent manner. MPTCP schedules traffic of one TCP connection over subflows created over these network interfaces. It is evident that this requires some scheduling policy. There have been some attempts to allow applications to decide on the scheduling policy. However, this violates the application transparency of MPTCP, and applications do not have all the information required to decide on such a policy. In addition, this allows the applications to monopolize the network connection thus posing a security threat as well. We argue that only the owner of the device (the user) has the right to make that policy decision and only the user can make an informed decision on the scheduling policy. For example, the user has the information on the monetary cost of the connections through different interfaces. In this paper we present a mechanism that allows the user to provide hints to the TCP scheduler to alter its scheduling policy. While this is not a mechanism to implement generic scheduling policies, it demonstrates how a user can guide the scheduling policies. As a proof of the concept, we demonstrate how MPTCP scheduler can be influenced to select a less stable and lossy path over a stable path based on a user preference.

Today's laptops and mobile terminals are equipped with several network interfaces belonging to different access technologies. Users can benefit from multi-homing to access network services anywhere, at any time and from any network. Multipath TCP (MPTCP) is a modified version of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) which allows a TCP connection to simultaneously send data over multiple paths. One of the objectives of MPTCP is to improve the throughput of TCP connection. A MPTCP connection over multiple paths should achieve a no worse throughput than a single TCP connection over the best constituent path. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of MPTCP in terms of throughput optimization and load sharing. The measurements show that the context of heterogeneous networks (Ethernet, Wifi and 3G) has a great impact on the MPTCP performances and reveal the need of an intelligent algorithm for interface selection in MPTCP.

Space-ground integrated networks (SGINs) have been recently regarded as a promising way to provide resilient, dependable as well as efficient data transmission in the high-speed railway (HSR) scenario. Applying multipath transmission control protocol (MPTCP) to SGIN can realize data transmission simultaneously via terrestrial and satellite networks. However, since the existing congestion control (CC) mechanisms of MPTCP fail to distinguish between adverse influences (such as packet loss and/or round-trip time increase) caused by congestion and those caused by handovers, it suffers severe performance degradation in the HSR scenario where handover frequently occurs. In this article, we first present the SGIN oriented HSR (SGIN-HSR) with MPTCP. Then leveraging cross-layer information (i.e., reference signal received power), we design a novel cross-layer aided MPTCP CC mechanism targeted at SGIN-HSR based on deep reinforcement learning, which is referred to as HSR-CC, to alleviate performance degradation problems induced by handover. The experimental results show that HSR-CC significantly enhances the goodput and outperforms state-of-the-art MPTCP CC algorithms in SGIN-HSR environments where handover frequently occurs.