This paper investigates the resilience of mobile communication networks during the extreme flooding that affected Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, in May 2024. Based on regulatory data and technical insights from operators, the study identifies the leading causes of network disruptions, primarily related to flooding and prolonged power outages. The results reveal the significant vulnerability of modern networks (4G/5G) during the event and the essential role played by legacy technologies (2G/3G) in sustaining basic connectivity under adverse conditions. The findings underscore the necessity of disaster-aware infrastructure planning, taking into account the ongoing significance of legacy systems, diversified power supply strategies, and resilient network designs to enhance service continuity during future crises.

Traffic delivery is fundamental for user experience on the Internet. To achieve this, Autonomous Systems (ASes) rely on their multiple connectivity options and manipulate prefix announcements to influence neighboring ASes' route decisions. One crucial aspect not yet investigated is how traffic engineering techniques may affect the prefix suitability of being hijacked or impacted by a route leak. We aim to examine how AS's connectivity and inbound traffic engineering techniques influence routing security. We use the PEERING Testbed combined with data and control plane measurements to offer systematical analyses of these aspects. Our preliminary evaluation indicates that connectivity plays an important role and that using ASPP directly influences the security impacts.

In May 2024, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil's southernmost state, endured a month of severe rainfall, leading to extensive infrastructure damage in more than 400 cities. This major climatic event caused widespread disruptions to the state's infrastructure, including roads, bridges, electrical plants, data centers, communication systems, and homes, affecting millions of people. In this paper, we describe the datasets we are collecting from various sources, including official reports, IXP connectivity and routing information, Internet quality measurements, and failure reports from data centers, the ISPs assotiation in the region, and the Brazilian National Research and Education Network. These datasets are being used to provide the first analyses of how these events affected the resilience of the Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure in Rio Grande do Sul. We plan to make these datasets available to the community for future studies on the climate impact on communications infrastructure and to better identify the challenges faced when resilience is critically tested. Additionally, we hope this data can outline improvements in ICT infrastructure to enhance operations and aid in the reconstruction process.

Internet eXchange Points (IXPs) provide an infrastructure where content providers and consumers can freely exchange network traffic. The main incentive for connecting to an IXP is to decrease costs and improve the user experience by having content closer to consumers. Despite these benefits, several small Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) avoid exchanging traffic on IXPs due to the poor routing quality via IXP paths. In this paper, we investigate how traffic asymmetry affects the quality of paths. IXP asymmetry occurs when traffic is sent (or received) via a direct IXP peering but received (or sent) on an alternative path outside the IXP. We employ a new method to quantify a symmetry rate for an IXP, which we evaluate on five IXPs. Our method covers three times more ASes than alternatives, such as using RIPE ATLAS. Our results show that IXPs have 15% asymmetric paths at a distance of one AS hop, i.e., when sending traffic to a given peer on the IXP, 15% of this traffic will be responded via a transit AS that does not use the IXP path. We also identify deaf neighbors, i.e., ASes that never return traffic to the IXP. We identify egress-only paths as a major cause of asymmetries and show that this occurs only for a small number of ASes. We also quantify the impact of traffic asymmetry at IXPs in terms of latency and show that traditional traffic engineering on IXP prefixes can actually make route quality worse.

In 2022 the Russian invasion of Ukraine began. It is known that Ukraine faced outages because of the damage to their infrastructure. It is also known that Russia was boycotted by the international community. However the impact on the telecommunications of the two countries remains unknown. In this paper we quantified the degree to which the Internet was affected in both countries by analyzing routing tables from five large Internet Exchange Points (IXPs). IXPs provide a central point of interconnection where internet traffic can be freely exchanged between Autonomous Systems (ASes). This centrality makes IXPs a good vantage point for analyzing changes in the Internet infrastructure. With data collected before and after the start of the conflict we observed considerable damage to the Ukrainian Internet network with numerous outages and minimal damage to the Russian network. An average of 11.12% of Ukrainian ASes were unreachable at each IXP. We identified the biggest outages and the events responsible for them. This paper highlights resilience issues during conflicts to the network and management community, and serves as a basis for future more in-depth research.

IP anycast has become a vital technology for DNS and CDN operators alike. Yet, while big operators have their tools to monitor and configure anycast routing, most of anycast networks are still configured manually. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to anycast management. Our solution is based on active measurements combined with traffic engineering. We propose the concept of a "BGP Cookbook" that allows operators to forecast the effects of routing policy changes over their services. We also introduce a web-based interface, called "BGP Anycast Tuner", that allows operators to gain insight into their service's performance and provides easy management through automation. We evaluate our approach by implementing a prototype running in a testbed composed of 12 anycast sites covering 5 continents. We demonstrate our tool in two different use cases: discovering and fixing a sub-optimal anycast routing issue, and shifting traffic between continents, which is useful during service disruptions.

Anycast addressing - assigning the same IP address to multiple, distributed devices - has become a fundamental approach to improving the resilience and performance of Internet services, but its conventional deployment model makes it impossible to infer from the address itself that it is anycast. Existing methods to detect anycast IPv4 prefixes present accuracy challenges stemming from routing and latency dynamics, and efficiency and scalability challenges related to measurement load. We review these challenges and introduce a new technique we call "MAnycast2" that can help overcome them. Our technique uses a distributed measurement platform of anycast vantage points as sources to probe potential anycast destinations. This approach eliminates any sensitivity to latency dynamics, and greatly improves efficiency and scalability. We discuss alternatives to overcome remaining challenges relating to routing dynamics, suggesting a path toward establishing the capability to complete, in under 3 hours, a full census of which IPv4 prefixes in the ISI hitlist are anycast.

Internet of Things devices being used now expose limitations that prevent their proper use in healthcare systems. Interoperability and security are especially impacted by such limitations. In this paper, we discuss today's issues, including benefits and difficulties, as well as approaches to circumvent the problems of employing and integrating Internet of Things devices in healthcare systems. We present this discussion in the context of the REMOA project, which targets a solution for home care/telemonitoring for patients with chronic illnesses.

Mashups are powerful applications created from accessing and composing multiple and distributed information sources. Their ease-of-use and modularity allow users at any skill level to construct, share and integrate their own applications. However, data security concerns remain a hindering factor in its widespread adoption, in particular, for network management. In this paper, we propose a novel development methodology and system architecture called Maestro that allows developers to express their data privacy concerns and enforce policies during mashup executions. We evaluated Maestro by building two mashup applications for managing live networks and by running performance tests that show that our runtime has negligible overhead.

Mashups are a new breed of Web applications, created through the integration of external resources available on the Web. Recently, they have been considered a hallmark of Web 2.0 technologies, placing the end user on a developer role and encouraging both collaboration and reuse. Following the increasing efforts in investigating new approaches to network management, mashups present themselves as a technology that can bring several advantages to the field. However, to this date, the usage of mashups in network management remains unexplored. Therefore, the present paper approaches this subject, proposing a Mashup Development Tool to network management. We discuss both the architecture of such system and a proof of concept prototype. We them employ our prototype to address the case study of integrating Autonomous System routing information.

Service composition is a technique that may help the development of management systems by aggregating smaller services to produce more sophisticated ones. Service composition can be realized by using traditional management technologies, although these technologies have not been conceived taking composition support as one of their main aspects. Current service-oriented architecture (SOA)-related efforts, however, define specific standards for Web services composition, such as the Web services business process execution language (WS-BPEL). Web services for network management have been investigated by the management community at least in the last four years, but up to today no research evaluating Web services composition applied to network management has been carried out. In this paper we present such an evaluation where compositions based on the IETF Script MIB, ad-hoc Java Web services, and WS- BPEL are compared against one another in a managed network where BGP routers are investigated in order to identify route advertisement anomalies.