Modeling ISP tier design

Software Defined Networks (SDN) is a networking paradigm that separates the control plane from the data plan of a network, and controls data flow with a SDN controller. This networking model would be useful for ISP (Internet Service Provider) networks in order to control their own networks via the controller. Unfortunately, it is difficult to fully implement SDN in ISP networking due to financial and operational constraints. In this article, we will identify the various migration challenges for hybrid SDN in ISP networks, and investigate on the network planning tools currently available in the market that with regards to facilitate the migration process. Lastly, we will discuss on the future direction of research and development in the field of hybrid SDN migration.

Caching is the key feature of Content Centric Networking (CCN) that allows the Internet Service Provider (ISP) to reduce network traffic crossing its network, and save bandwidth usage cost. On the other hand, it is also on benefit of the Content Providers (CPs) to cache the contents within the ISP network near the consumers. However, caching paid contents (the contents that only paying consumers can access), which are the main source of income for CP, in the ISP network complicates the CP's task of controlling content access and payment. Thus, ISP manages content placement inside its cache-enabled routers and serves content based on user demands, without any coordination with CP. There is no profit sharing mechanism between both ISP and CPs. Therefore, a payment mechanism between ISP and CPs that considers paid content caching and distribution inside the ISP network is needed. To address this challenge, we propose a new incentive mechanism for paid content caching that satisfies both ISP and CPs through the use of reverse auction. The ISP monetizes its cache storage through caching contents from multiple CPs and selling them to its customers. The reverse auction helps the ISP to get prices from multiple CPs, and to select the price that minimize its total payment. The simulation results show that our proposal satisfies all network players involved in in- network caching through increasing their utilities.

This chapter introduces a greedy approach for delay monitoring of IP networks. It proposed two-phased monitoring scheme that ensures complete coverage of the network from both links and paths point of views, and it minimizes the monitoring overhead on the underlying production network. In the first phase it computes the locations of monitoring stations such that all network links or paths are covered by the minimal number of stations. Subsequently, in the second phase, it computes the minimal set of probe messages to be sent by each station such that the latency of every routing path can be measured. Unfortunately, both the station selection and the probe assignment problems are NP-hard. However, by using greedy approximation algorithms the scheme finds solutions close to the best possible approximations to both the station selection and the probe assignment problems. Further, the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented algorithms for accurately monitoring large networks with very few monitoring stations and probe messages close to the number of network links.

The Fast ReRoute (FRR) is an area that addresses issues of network recovery in the event of crucial devices or line failures in the network. During the event of a failure in the ISP network, the process of network convergence starts. This process may last unpredictable time and traffic affected by the failure may be inevitably lost. FRR mechanisms work mostly on the principle of a precalculated backup route. After a failure at one of the protected nodes in the network, the FRR mechanism will use a specific backup route to redirect traffic away from the location affected by the failure. By using FRR mechanisms in the Internet Service Provider (ISP) network, we can minimize the time required for network recovery to the order of tens of milliseconds and thus ensure immediate recovery of communication after a network outage.

Traditionally, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) make profit by providing Internet connectivity, while content providers (CPs) play the more lucrative role of delivering content to users. As network connectivity is increasingly a commodity, ISPs have a strong incentive to offer content to their subscribers by deploying their own content distribution infrastructure. Providing content services in an ISP network presents new opportunities for coordination between traffic engineering (to select efficient routes for the traffic) and server selection (to match servers with subscribers). In this work, we develop a mathematical framework that considers three models with an increasing amount of cooperation between the ISP and the CP. We show that separating server selection and traffic engineering leads to sub-optimal equilibria, even when the CP is given accurate and timely information about the ISP's network in a partial cooperation. More surprisingly, extra visibility may result in a less efficient outcome and such performance degradation can be unbounded. Leveraging ideas from cooperative game theory, we propose an architecture based on the concept of Nash bargaining solution. Simulations on realistic backbone topologies are performed to quantify the performance differences among the three models. Our results apply both when a network provider attempts to provide content, and when separate ISP and CP entities wish to cooperate. This study is a step toward a systematic understanding of the interactions between those who provide and operate networks and those who generate and distribute content.

Modeling router-level networks is a challenging task, for it is unclear today as how to represent such networks by a simple and accurate model of modest size and complexity. To provide more insights into router-level network modeling, this paper studies some topological features of several Internet service provider (ISP) networks. The main concern is on the relationships amongst bandwidth constraints, topological features, and engineering design consideration. Computer experiments show some highly unlikely topological structures to network congestion, which are common amongst several geographically independent ISP networks. It suggests that engineering design consideration paves a feasible way to model router-level networks. The findings in this paper may provide some new information toward developing a more realistic model for the router-level Internet.

The paper describes an Internet Protocol (IP) version 6 (v6) introduction to an IP version 4 (v4) Internet Service Provider (ISP) network infrastructure. The case study driver is an ISP willing to introduce a new killer service related to Internet of Things (IoT) style building automation. The ISP and cooperation of third party companies specialized in building automation will provide the service. The ISP has to deliver the network access layer and to accommodate the building automation solution traffic throughout its network infrastructure. The third party companies are system integrators and building automation solution vendors. IPv6 is suitable for such solutions due to the following reasons. The operator can't accommodate large number of IPv4 embedded devices in its current network due to the lack of address space and the fact that many of those will need clear 2-way IP communication channel.The Authors propose a strategy for IPv6 introduction into operator infrastructure based on the current network architecture, present service portfolio and several transition mechanisms. The strategy has been tested in laboratory with setup close or identical to the current operator's network. The criteria for a successful experiment is full two-way IPv6 application layer connectivity between the IPv6 server and the IPv6 Internet of Things (IoT) cloud.

The cost minimization of virtual private networks (VPN) that use the resources of an underlying transport network is the key factor for their successful implementation. The investigation in this paper is focused on 'network based VPNs', where the operation of the VPN is outsourced to an Internet Service Provider (ISP). The interest in such solutions is generated both by customers seeking to reduce support costs and by ISPs seeking new revenue sources. Solving the cost minimization would allow Internet service providers (ISPs) to define and deploy new VPN services. The basic building block of VPN is the tunnel. A tunnel operates as an overlay across the backbone, and the traffic sent through the tunnel is opaque to the underlying backbone. A VPN end point can terminate multiple tunnels or forward packets between different tunnels. Different tunnels can share the same physical link and traffic belonging to the same VPN tunnel can be carried along different physical links. The multiplexing and management of the VPN tunnels is made possible by core routers supporting the VPN of the underlying network. The novelty of the presented work is the network flow model of VPN mapping on the underlying ISP network. We assume that the VPN topology, the topology of the ISP network and the total utilization cost for all underlying links are known parameters. Based on this, we propose a network management system based on a network flow optimization in order to define the minimal cost link allocation for the VPN tunnels. We provide a simulation of the proposed optimal establishment of VPN tunnels and performance evaluation of the simulation results.

With the popularity of smart devices such as smartphones, tablets, contents that traditionally be viewed on a personal computer, can also be viewed on these smart devices. The demand for contents thus is increasing year by year, which makes the content providers (CPs) get high revenue from either users' subscription or advertisement. On the other hand, Internet service providers (ISPs), who keep investing in the network technology or capacity to support the huge traffic generated by contents, do not benefit directly from the content traffic. One choice for ISPs is to charge CPs to share the revenue from the huge content traffic. Then ISPs will have enough incentives to invest in network infrastructure to improve quality of services (QoS), which eventually benefit CPs and users. This paper presents a novel economic model called Stackelberg-Bertrand game to capture the interaction and competitions among ISPs, CPs and users when ISPs charge CPs. A generic user demand function is assumed to capture the sensitivity of demand to prices of ISPs and CPs. The numerical results show that the price elasticity of ISP and CP plays an important part on the payoff of the ISP and CP.

With the inception of smart grid technologies, electric utilities have been attempting multifarious mechanisms to transport information from data generating entities to their information control centers. One such approach for carrying application data is to lease communication network capacity from Internet service providers (ISPs). Such dedicated capacity reservations on communication networks can be a costly proposition for electric utilities. This work proposes an alternative paradigm that takes advantage of the elastic nature of smart grid data traffic flows to piggyback (with authorization) on ISP networks without impacting the QoS of the primary flows on that network. Such an opportunistic scheme is expected to reduce operational costs for utilities to carry smart grid data traffic while providing guarantees to ISPs that their primary flows will be unaffected. The proposed opportunistic network sharing scheme builds upon a software-defined networking (SDN) approach at an intermediate router to provide QoS guarantees for regular ISP traffic. To mitigate the inevitable throttling of smart grid traffic during times of high network utilization in the shared network, a data granularity management algorithm is proposed that gracefully reduces the data granularity of smart grid (SG) data traffic in preemptive fashion in an attempt to meet application QoS needs.

This report describes a project which creates an upgraded topology based on the Internet service provider (ISP) environment. In the current service provider network, reliability, availability and management have become issues which need to be considered. Many technologies have been presented to solve these issues. This project is based on the virtual environment finished by simulators which are tools necessary to accomplish the project. In this project, two simulators are applied. One simulator creates a network topology which can be used to simulate real architecture, check all the protocols and process packets exchange. The second simulator deals with traffic. In the virtual environment, the simulated traffic will be created, collected and analysed. From this operation, a report about the advantages and disadvantages in both the current and the upgraded network environments will be generated. Detailed results are then compared, explained and clearly presented using data format.

Steering Incentives of Platforms: Evidence from the Telecommunications Industry

Device fingerprinting can be used by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to identify vulnerable IoT devices for early prevention of threats. However, due to the wide deployment of middleboxes in ISP networks, some important data, e.g., 5-tuples and flow statistics, are often obscured, rendering many existing approaches invalid. It is further challenged by the high-speed traffic of hundreds of terabytes per day in ISP networks. This paper proposes DeviceRadar, an online IoT device fingerprinting framework that achieves accurate, real-time processing in ISPs using programmable switches. We innovatively exploit “key packets” as a basis of fingerprints only using packet sizes and directions, which appear periodically while exhibiting differences across different IoT devices. To utilize them, we propose a packet size embedding model to discover the spatial relationships between packets. Meanwhile, we design an algorithm to extract the “key packets” of each device, and propose an approach that jointly considers the spatial relationships and the key packets to produce a neighboring key packet distribution, which can serve as a feature vector for machine learning models for inference. Last, we design a model transformation method and a feature extraction process to deploy the model on a programmable data plane within its constrained arithmetic operations and memory to achieve line-speed processing. Our experiments show that DeviceRadar can achieve state-of-the-art accuracy across 77 IoT devices with 40 Gbps throughput, and requires only 1.3% of the processing time compared to GPU-accelerated approaches.

The main objective of this paper is to propose and develop a billing system for use by Internet service providers (ISPs) to charge Internet users according to their network usage (i.e. their traffic). This means that users are charged depending on the volume of traffic they create. The main idea of the proposed billing system is that when a user attempts to establish a connection with the outside world, the connection establishment is postponed while the user is authenticated and it is verified that he is ready to pay for this connection. Generally, if the user is ready to pay, the connection is established and his traffic (which reflects his usage) is metered. An invoice is generated according to the metered traffic. The proposed billing system consists of two main components, the meter module and invoice generation module. We measure several key statistics, such as connection setup time, active connection count, response time and complexity of searching the connection tables, without the billing system and with it to determine whether or not it is feasible to implement the proposed billing system. The system can be used to allocate an ISP's network resources fairly and efficiently. It can also be used to overcome network congestion problems.

With the development of wireless network technologies, the number of mobile devices (MDs), such as smartphones and wearable devices, is growing at an unprecedented rate. In the 5G networks, mobile devices obtain wireless network services from the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) by signing contracts. Generally speaking, there are usually more than one ISP in the network service market. Therefore, mobile users (MUs) face the difficulty of selecting network services from these ISPs. In this paper, we consider a network service market with MUs selecting network services from one ISP who prices are set differently for different MUs. We model the interaction between the ISP and MUs as a Stackelberg game, under which the prices of the network service of the ISP are firstly determined, and the MUs make decisions based on the network service prices. We applied the backward induction way to prove the unique existence of the equilibrium. Simulation results are provided to show the analysis results.