The threat of commoditization poses a real challenge for service providers. Offering only a "plain vanilla" IP packet delivery service limits the options for competitive differentiation. Conversely, embedding additional functionality in the network carries a number of risks -- decreased robustness and increased complexity, for example. The key to addressing this challenge is the careful selection of appropriate functionality to embed in the network. Functions should be added to the network only when they offer value to a wide range of applications, and they should not inhibit the correct operation of applications that do not need them. This talk addresses the question of how novel, useful functions might be embedded "inside" the network, and how best to evaluate candidate functions for inclusion.

Current intra-domain Traffic Engineering (TE) relies on offline methods, which use long term average traffic demands. It cannot react to realtime traffic changes caused by BGP reroutes, diurnal traffic variations, attacks, or flash crowds. Further, current TE deals with network failures by pre-computing alternative routings for a limited set of failures. It may fail to prevent congestion when unanticipated or combination failures occur, even though the network has enough capacity to handle the failure.This paper presents TeXCP, an online distributed TE protocol that balances load in realtime, responding to actual traffic demands and failures. TeXCP uses multiple paths to deliver demands from an ingress to an egress router, adaptively moving traffic from over-utilized to under-utilized paths. These adaptations are carefully designed such that, though done independently by each edge router based on local information, they balance load in the whole network without oscillations. We model TeXCP, prove the stability of the model, and show that it is easy to implement. Our extensive simulations show that, for the same traffic demands, a network using TeXCP supports the same utilization and failure resilience as a network that uses traditional offline TE, but with half or third the capacity.

Tag switching is a way to combine the label-swapping forwarding paradigm with network-layer routing with particular application to the Internet. This has several advantages. Tags can have a wide spectrum of forwarding granularities, so at one end of the spectrum a tag could be associated with a group of destinations, while at the other end, a tag could be associated with a single application flow. At the same time, forwarding based on tag switching, due to its simplicity, is well suited to high-performance forwarding. These factors facilitate the development of a routing system that is both functionally rich and scalable. Last, tag switching simplifies the integration of routers and asynchronous transfer mode switches by employing common addressing, routing, and management procedures.

This paper describes our experiences, from a software perspective, with the OSIRIS network adaptor. It first identifies the problems we encountered while programming OSIRIS and optimizing network performance, and outlines how we either addressed them in the software, or had to modify the hardware. It then describes the opportunities provided by OSIRIS that we were able to exploit in the host operating system (OS); opportunities that suggested techniques for making the OS more effective in delivering network data to application programs. The most novel of these techniques, called application device channels, gives application programs running in user space direct access to the adaptor. The paper concludes with the lessons drawn from this work, which we believe will benefit the designers of future network adaptors.

In the design of a high-speed network, the host network interface is a critical component in achieving high end-to-end throughput. Some of the architectural issues involved in host interfacing are discussed. These include the appropriate partitioning of functionality between host and interface and the choice of mechanism for data movement into, out of, and within the host. The general issues are considered in a specific example: the realization of a highly flexible host interface for a 622-Mb/s asynchronous transfer mode network. The architecture of such an interface is described, and the experimental results obtained from its prototype implementation are presented. The prototype will allow experimentation with a variety of scheduling and segmentation/reassembly algorithms, and with new transport protocols, while also delivering high bandwidths to the host.>

AURORA is one of five US testbeds charged with exploring applications of, and technologies necessary for, networks operating at gigabit per second or higher bandwidths. The authors provide an overview of the goals and methodologies employed in AURORA and report preliminary results from the first year of research. AURORA is an experiment in collaboration, where government support has spurred interaction among centers of excellence in industry, academia, and government. The emphasis of the AURORA testbed is research into the supporting technologies for gigabit networking. The targets include new software architectures, network abstractions, hardware technologies, and applications. The AURORA testbed will provide a platform in which researchers can explore business and scientific applications of gigabit networks, while evolving the network architecture to meet the needs of these emerging applications.>

article A host-network interface architecture for ATM Share on Author: Bruce S. Davie Bell Communications Research, Morristown, NJ Bell Communications Research, Morristown, NJView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication ReviewVolume 21Issue 4Sept. 1991 pp 307–315https://doi.org/10.1145/115994.116020Online:01 August 1991Publication History 58citation634DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations58Total Downloads634Last 12 Months21Last 6 weeks4 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access