Software defined network‐based multipath state‐aware routing with traffic prediction in satellite network

Satellite communication networks, as an effective complement to terrestrial communication networks, enable global coverage communications. The Low-orbit satellite network has the characteristics of low transmission delay, short operation period and global coverage communication, it has become a popular research direction in satellite communication networks. With the continuous development of digital and intelligent communication in the world, satellite network services continue to expand, and higher requirements are placed on network transmission performance. The traditional single-structure low-orbit satellite network using centralized routing has been unable to meet current needs.. Therefore, with the low-orbit satellite network as the core, people have conducted in-depth research on satellite communication network routing algorithms that meet the requirements of high-quality, high-efficiency and largecapacity communication. Especially in the three hot issues of low-orbit satellite network routing algorithms, a lot of research results have emerged, including: QoS-based artificial intelligence algorithm routing algorithm; multi-layer satellite network routing algorithm; satellite network multipath routing algorithm. Through the analysis and discussion of these problems and achievements, the idea of combining the three algorithms on demand is proposed, and the challenges are analyzed.

The aviation Internet Protocol (IP) network will be comprised of manned and unmanned aircraft, ground infrastructure, air to ground access network service providers, Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSP), content provider networks, OEM networks, airline and operator networks and devices, and supporting infrastructure (includes PKI, mobility and management etc.). There will be a full range of applications and protocols that will adopt and exploit the aviation IP network. It is key to understand the security and performance characteristics of the aviation IP networks. Many of the applications, services and protocols that could drive deployment of Internet Protocol Suite (IPS) networking in aviation can only be developed if control and management planes of the network will be secure. Yet, to really understand these properties we need studies of the whole aviation IP network's control and management plane interfaces and sub interfaces protection and security, which are difficult to obtain. To date most studies have not been completed in this area, or the analyses have been conducted using unrealistic network mobility models. To address this issue, we present an extensive analysis of an aviation IP network control and management plane's security in the context of mobility generated by both air to ground and ground to ground systems. We combined control plane and management plane data security to address the aviation IP network security issues and explore the security provision mechanisms to protect aviation critical infrastructure. Hence, this analysis and security mechanisms are a more accurate representation of future aviation IP networks, since it reflects the realistic aviation network eco-system. We analyzed the network to identify and characterize the key properties starting from the characteristics of the aircraft movement and dependency on the IP network control and management plane's security framework. We then explored the security issus related to the IPS control and management planes and evaluated how the security issue impact the design space for deployment.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a networking approach that separates the network's control plane and data plane to provide better network control. The nature of SDN requires an essential focus on its reliability and availability, which includes failure detection aspects. Several techniques have been proposed to enhance SDN failure detection, including passive and active approaches. However, the Route Inspection (RI) algorithm, an example of the active probing method in active detection, has scalability issues when deployed in large-scale networks as it generates inefficient and lengthy probe paths. To address this, we propose using community detection (CD) algorithms to improve the probe path generation of the RI algorithm, resulting in the 'Failure Detection using Community Detection and probing (FDCD)' framework. With the aim to reduce travel paths, the proposed framework minimizes the network topology using CD algorithms to reduce the topology size into smaller communities. Then, the RI algorithm calculates the probe path in the communities instead of the single large topology, thus improving the efficiency of the failure detection mechanism. This paper adopts three community detection algorithms: Louvain, Label Propagation, and Girvan-Newman. We evaluate the framework using three well-known network topologies, COST266, PIORO40, and GERMANY50, in Mininet to observe the framework's performance. The results indicate that the proposed approach improves the algorithm's scalability against its baseline approach, improving the average probe round trip time by 66.87% and the average path installation time by 2.67%.

The performance of satellite networks largely depends on their routing algorithm. Existing routing algorithms for satellite networks usually are not quite adaptive or have the disadvantage of a large consumption in both computation and storage resources. In this paper, we propose a novel routing algorithm based on dynamic clustering for LEO satellite networks. By dynamic forming cluster of the satellite network, the routing algorithm is both adaptive, computational effective and need much less storage space. Simulation results show that our routing algorithm performs better and are more robust when the network topology changes.

While Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) gains growing popularity during the last two decades, it faces several new challenges in meeting the requirements of emerging applications due to spectrum shortage, complicated network management and inefficient radio resource allocation (RRA) in densely deployed scenarios. The operating band has evolved from microwave band (a.k.a. sub-6 GHz) to millimeter-wave band (mmWave for short) or even multi-band to provide higher data rates. However, the existing distributed WLAN architecture works in different bands separately and doesn't support the coordination among access points (APs), making it difficult for efficient network management and improved quality of service (QoS) provisioning. In overcoming these challenges, a centralized control architecture for WLAN with decoupled control and data planes can be used to orchestrate the RRA within the whole network while achieving improved communication performance. Therefore, a new control/data plane decoupled WLAN architecture is designed in this paper to realize efficient network management and optimized RRA by separating the control plane and data plane into sub-6 GHz and mmWave respectively. Then, we propose the sub-6 GHz assisted mmWave beamforming protocol, which can significantly reduce the overhead of beamforming training (BFT). Last, we investigate joint RRA for the control/data plane decoupled WLAN since the control plane affects the RRA in the data plane. Performance analysis and simulation show that the joint RRA mechanism in the control/data plane decoupled network can significantly improve the number of successfully scheduled users and the sum-rate compared with the traditional RRA.

Security on the Internet today is treated mostly as a data plane problem. IDS's, firewalls, and spam filters all operate on the simple principle of detecting malicious data plane behavior and erecting data plane filters. In this paper we explore how breaking down the barrier between the control and data plane can significantly enhance our understanding of how to detect and filter Internet threats like worms and botnets. Our investigation is guided by two specific goals: using information and anomalies detected on the data plane to inform control plane decision support and using anomalies detected on the control plane to inform data plane filtering. We begin by analyzing the source of persistent worms and other persistent malicious and misconfigured data plane traffic to understand the scope of this behavior on the control plane. We then analyze how anomalies on the control plane associated with poorly managed networks and are correlated with the sources of malicious and misconfigured traffic detected on the data plane. Our results show that malicious and misconfigured data plane behavior is widely spread across the control plane suggesting that constructing a few control plane filters to block the most infected organizations will not have a significant impact. We demonstrate that networks with data plane anomalies tend to exhibit more routing misconfigurations. Finally, we discuss how these correlations could be used to reject or filter routes and help stop recurring threats like persistent worms.

As an important part of satellite communication network, LEO satellite constellation network is one of the hot research directions. Since the nonuniform distribution of terrestrial services may cause inter-satellite link congestion, improving network load balancing performance has become one of the key issues that need to be solved for routing algorithms in LEO network. Therefore, by expanding the range of available paths and combining the congestion avoidance mechanism, a load balancing routing algorithm based on extended link states in LEO constellation network is proposed. Simulation results show that the algorithm achieves a balanced distribution of traffic load, reduces link congestion and packet loss rate, and improves throughput of LEO satellite network.

Software-defined network (SDN) radically changes the network architecture by decoupling the network logic from the underlying forwarding devices. This architectural change rejuvenates the network-layer granting centralized management and reprogrammability of the networks. From a security perspective, SDN separates security concerns into control and data plane, and this architectural recomposition brings up exciting opportunities and challenges. The overall perception is that SDN capabilities will ultimately result in improved security. However, in its raw form, SDN could potentially make networks more vulnerable to attacks and harder to protect. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of SDN security domain while focusing on its data plane, which is one of the least explored but most critical aspects in securing this technology. We review the most recent enhancements in SDNs, identify the main vulnerabilities of SDNs, and provide a novel attack taxonomy for SDNs. Thereafter, we provide a comprehensive analysis of challenges involved in protecting SDN data plane and control plane and provide an in-depth look into available solutions with respect to the identified threats and identify their limitations. To highlight the importance of securing the SDN platform, we also review the numerous security services built on top of this technology. We conclude the paper by offering future research directions.

Software-defined networking is a new paradigm that overcomes problems associated with traditional network architecture by separating the control logic from data plane devices. It also enhances performance by providing a highly-programmable interface that adapts to dynamic changes in network policies. As software-defined networking controllers are prone to single-point failures, providing security is one of the biggest challenges in this framework. This paper intends to provide an intrusion detection mechanism in both the control plane and data plane to secure the controller and forwarding devices respectively. In the control plane, we imposed a flow-based intrusion detection system that inspects every new incoming flow towards the controller. In the data plane, we assigned a signature-based intrusion detection system to inspect traffic between Open Flow switches using port mirroring to analyse and detect malicious activity. Our flow-based system works with the help of trained, multi-layer machine learning-based classifier, while our signature-based system works with rule-based classifiers using the Snort intrusion detection system. The ensemble feature selection technique we adopted in the flow-based system helps to identify the prominent features and hasten the classification process. Our proposed work ensures a high level of security in the Software-defined networking environment by working simultaneously in both control plane and data plane.

Guest editorial IJSCN special issue on 3GPP NTN standards for future satellite communications

Network is dynamic and requires update in the operation. However, many confusions and problems can be caused by careless schedule in the update process. Although the problem has been investigated for many years in traditional networks where the control plane is distributed, software defined networking (SDN) brings new opportunities and solutions to this problem by the separation of control and data plane, as well as the centralized control. This paper makes a survey on the problems caused by network update, including forwarding loop, forwarding black hole, link congestion, network policy violation, etc., as well as the state-of-the-art SDN solutions to these problems. Furthermore, we summarize the network configuration strength and discuss the open issues of network update in the SDN paradigm.

SDN-enabled networks offer a great degree of flexibility, programmability and support for multiple applications. Applications running on top of a SDN controller could further benefit if network state information were made available to them as part of the SDN framework. Our work investigates the requirements for abstracting network state on the control plane. We intend to show that, by meeting these pre-requisites, network state can be made available with the guarantee of state safety and integrity. We envision that our state management abstraction will provide safety in the data plane and aid better programmability in the control plane.

Modern network interfaces demand highly intelligent traffic management in addition to the basic requirement of wire speed packet forwarding. Several vendors are releasing network processors in order to handle these demands. Network workloads can be classified into data plane and control plane workloads, however most network processors are optimized for data plane. Also, existing benchmark suites for network processors primarily contain data plane workloads, which perform packet processing for a forwarding function. We present a set of benchmarks, called NpBench, targeted towards control plane (e.g., traffic management, quality of service, etc.) as well as data plane workloads. The characteristics of NpBench workloads, such as instruction mix, parallelism, cache behavior and required processing capability per packet, are presented and compared with CommBench, an existing network processor benchmark suite [T. Wolf et. al., (2000)]. We also discuss the architectural characteristics of the benchmarks having control plane functions, their implications to designing network processors and the significance of instruction level parallelism (ILP) in network processors.

Driven by the requirement of increasing performance and flexibility, networks are being softwarized by paradigms such as software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV). These solutions reduce the complexity and the specialization of hardware devices, by extracting the inherently distributed control plane of forwarding network elements such as switches and routers, to a logically centralized control plane (referred as controller in SDN). The control plane acts as a broker between the network applications (e.g. monitoring, traffic engineering) and the data plane (i.e. physical network infrastructure). For scalability and robustness, the logically centralized control plane is implemented by physically distributing different controllers throughout the network. This chapter presents different solutions to increase the reliability of both planes: data and control planes. The reliability of the data plane can be increased by considering survivable virtual network embedding solutions. This chapter proposes a survivable embedding against single and double failures at either links or nodes. Furthermore, in order to provide a programmable and resilient data plane, BPFabric has been proposed for SDN which supports high performance functions suitable for detecting attacks. On the other hand, the reliability of the control plane applied to SDN can be addressed by considering enhanced controller placement solutions providing redundancy against uncorrelated as well as targeted failures while coping with latency and capacity requirements. Furthermore, a solution to increase the security and robustness of the control channel is also addressed in this chapter.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is believed to be a promising networking practice in facing the challenges of ever-increasing traffic demand and network growth. With wider deployment of SDN enabled network infrastructures, the conventional network virtualization problem will gradually evolve into an SDN virtualization problem, in which both virtual data plane and control plane entities are instantiated from their physical network counterparts. In this paper, we first argue that the delay constrained virtual SDN embedding problem is in general different from the conventional virtual network (VN) embedding problem. This paper tries to define the delay constrained vSDN embedding problem space, followed by a potential network architecture that supports SDN virtualization. This study then formulates the delay constrained vSDN embedding problem with the objective of maximizing request acceptance ratio and proposes a set of heuristics to tackle the embedding problem. Our results show that both the control plane placement and data plane mapping are restricted by a strict controller-to-switch (C2S) delay constraint. When the delay constraint is relaxed over a certain value, the acceptance ratio is dominated by control plane resources or data plane resources. Certainly, with different resource configurations and substrate network diameters, the tolerances of C2S delay constraint are distinct.