Capacity sharing - the fair usage of the available capacity amongst a set of users - is relying solely on the end user/end hosts in today's Internet. This in principle allows malicious end users to consume disproportional amounts of capacity without obvious ways of stopping or charging them. Re-ECN is a resource sharing framework that enables such resource usage accountability by, amongst other things, employing enforcement points in the network. These are often described as packet droppers at or near the egress of an end-to-end path. This paper presents a packet dropper design that allows implementing the required congestion declaration enforcement efficiently. Our dropper design is based on a hybrid approach providing the effectiveness close to a complete stateful flow monitoring with the efficiency of a more stateless approach. We evaluate the effectiveness and the resource requirements through simulation.

In-network management (INM) is a paradigm for distributed and embedded management for future networks. One of its main design goals is to be used in conjunction with Network-as-a-Service (NaaS)-enabled networks, which need to be managed efficiently, in a way that requires only little manual interaction, and across administrative network domains. In this paper, we present an elaborate an INM prototype that we have implemented to demonstrate INM's capabilities, based on our previously introduced INM architecture. Using a comprehensive network scenario, we discuss a number of real-time and algorithm measurements to demonstrate how INM can enable efficient management of NaaS-enabled networks.

This paper proposes relay specific self-organized functions to optimize the Donor eNB (DeNB) selection upon alternating load and mobility conditions or when specific donors are out of operation due to failure. Initially, we identify the main parameters that influence such donor selection process introducing the inter-DeNB handover and the re-configuration overhead as additional optimization targets, before analyzing the proposed iterative improvement algorithms. Besides centralized solutions, we also introduce a novel distributed one, which may react faster compensating failure, load and mobility fluctuations using only neighbor DeNB information. A simulation study demonstrates the benefits of our approach against conventional schemes considering load balancing, loss, mobility regulation and overhead, providing the basis for deployment recommendations.

The looming depletion of the public IPv4 address space has recently inspired a number of proposals intended to work around the inevitable address shortage. Broadly, all of these can be classified as address sharing, tunneling and translation mechanisms. While IPv6 is the proper solution to the problem as it simply makes more addresses available, the deployment hurdles of IPv6 make it questionable whether it will be universally available once the IPv4 address pool runs out. In this paper we focus on one of these solutions, namely A+P, that allocates a "fraction" of an IP address to end hosts by restricting the usable port range. We compare a number of strategies to use and reuse port numbers. Based on data from an ISP's access line serving nearly 7000 residential broadband customers these strategies are analyzed. To this end, we performed a hypothetical optimization exercise to find the optimal number of customers that can share a single IPv4 address.

Next Generation Networks (NGNs) transport a variety of services across a converged IP-based network infrastructure. To assure the Quality of Experience (QoE) for the users, an end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) management is required. While solutions for QoS management and admission control in access and core networks exist, the inclusion of the home network remains still open. Thus, we present a novel remote control architecture and method to arrange for admission control within home networks and on their access lines. Our method makes use of existing SIP-based infrastructures like IMS or dedicated subsystems by defining a new SIP-based signaling protocol for home network control, which we name HRCP (Home Resource Control Protocol). As a benefit, the subsystems' capabilities for message routing, authentication, authorization and encryption can be re-used without the need to re-invent such methods again. In this paper we present an architecture based on ETSI TISPAN RACS along with message flows, results from a prototype implementation including the in-home QoS. Proof-of-concept is shown using a testbed with a small example service, namely an emergency service. Although our solution is presented within the scope of TISPAN RACS, it is applicable to any other type of remote session-based policy control system.

Network virtualization is an emerging trend claimed to reduce the costs of future networks. The key strategy in network virtualization is of slicing physical resources (links, routers, servers, etc.) to create virtual networks composed of subsets of these slices. One important challenge on network virtualization is the resource management of the physical or substrate networks. Sophisticated management techniques should be used to accomplish such management. The sophisticated techniques offered by autonomic communications rise as an appropriated alternative to address the challenges of managing the efficient use of substrate resources on network virtualization. Thus, this paper proposes a distributed self-organizing model to manage the substrate network resources. An evaluation scenario is depicted and simulations show that approximately 36.8% of the network traffic load can be spared when the self-organizing model is enabled in the evaluated scenario.

Base stations (BSs) are the main energy expenditure elements of cellular networks, considering the high coverage requirements and the fact that the total provisioned capacity is intended to match peak hour traffic demand. In this paper, we introduce energy saving algorithms based on coordination between network elements. We introduce the notion of energy partitions - associations of powered-on and powered-off BSs - to deliver energy saving with the objective of matching offered capacity with the traffic demand in a flexible manner. Our energy saving algorithms are based on shared knowledge of load and coverage information and enable an appropriate cell reconfiguration for achieving a network-level energy saving. Through a simulation-based evaluation, we analyze the performance of centralized and distributed algorithms under different network topologies and traffic conditions, highlight the benefits and drawbacks, and provide recommendations for deployment scenarios.

Nowadays IPTV offers a very wide range of multimedia content. On one side the increasing number of channels improves the chances of each viewer finding relevant content; on the other side it poses serious challenges in the navigation through the program grid. Typically, once a program has been selected, the only way to know what is being broadcasted on another one is by switching the channel. This paper proposes, discusses, and shows a prototype implementation of an innovative IPTV feature called Real-Time Meta-Data (RTMD) for automated recommendations. It provides IPTV systems with simple user-specific live event notification based on user profiles and only for subscribed channels. Event notifications can be automatically associated in the IPTV client with specific class of event reactions (e.g. channel switch) to enhance the IPTV user experience. Furthermore, rather than merely delivering channel-related information (e.g. a goal in a soccer match), this technology is also designed to provide additional services such as user-to-user or community notifications. In order to assess the feasibility of the approach, a small scale proof-of-concept prototype has been implemented. Subsequently, a validation in terms of both integration with existing standards and technical performance has been realized, fulfilling the initial expectations.

Network visualization is an emerging technology for cost-effective sharing of network resources. The key strategy in network virtualization is of slicing physical resources (links, CPU, memory, and storage) to create virtual networks that are assigned to different operators. One important challenge on network virtualization is the efficient use of the physical resources. To accomplish such efficient use the management of the physical resources should be transparent to the applications running within the virtual networks, and should be executed at runtime in order to deal with the variation on the load requests of different virtual networks. Traditional resource allocation schemes use offline, centralized, and global view strategies to manage the use of physical resources. In contrast to these strategies, we propose a runtime, distributed, local view approach to manage physical resources. In this paper we introduce a virtual network architecture and an associated self-organizing algorithm to reallocate virtual network resources along different physical nodes in order to equalize the bandwidth, and storage consumption on the physical nodes. We developed a virtual network model based on Omnet++ to simulate the designed self- organizing algorithm. An IPTV testbed scenario is presented and initial experiments, about the interruption time of the application inside the IPTV virtual network, are described.

In the progressive development of IPTV technology, special attention is being paid at the assurance of an appropriate service quality to the end user. Several research and standardization activities are studying how to provide QoS for IPTV streams along the delivery path from the Head End office/video server to the end user. The customer's premise is the last part of this path, and the one that is typically not under control of an operator. At the same time, the Home Network is becoming a complex environment, including a variety of devices and different network technologies. This paper presents an architecture for IPTV quality of service management focused on the Home Network. A key point of this solution is the introduction of service assurance functions in the Home Gateway. A prototype of the proposed solution proves the applicability of this approach.

This work proposes a probabilistic management paradigm for solving some major challenges of decentralized network management. Specifically, we show how to cope with 1) the overhead of redundant information gathering and processing, 2) the decentralized management in dynamic and unpredictable environments, and 3) the considerable effort required for decentralized coordination of management functions. To this end, we describe a framework for probabilistic decentralized management in the context of in-network management (INM). We demonstrate how this framework can be applied to a network of information, a novel clean-slate approach towards an information-centric future Internet. We show by means of a simulation study in the area of performance and fault management that we can significantly reduce the effort and resources dedicated to management, while we are able to achieve a sound level of accuracy of the overall network view.

Recent endeavors in addressing the challenges of the current and future Internet pursue a clean slate design methodology. Simultaneously, it is argued that the Internet is unlikely to be changed in one fell swoop and that its next generation requires an evolutionary design approach. Recognizing both positions, we claim that cleanness and evolution are not mutually exclusive, but rather complementary and indispensable properties for sustainable management in the future Internet. In this paper we propose the in-network management (INM) paradigm, which adopts a clean slate design approach to the management of future communication networks that is brought about by evolutionary design principles. The proposed paradigm builds on embedded management capabilities to address the intrinsic nature, and hence, close relationship between the network and its management. At the same time, INM assists in the gradual adoption of embedded self-managing processes to progressively achieve adequate and practical degrees of INM. We demonstrate how INM can be exploited in current and future network management by its application to P2P networks.

Event handling is a management mechanism that provides means for the network to react on changes in the network conditions or performance. In the construction of a clean-slate management architecture, we consider this as a main building block. This paper proposes a fully distributed event distribution in a fully distributed environment: differently from existing works, no configuration is required in advance, and yet nodes have guarantee that events are delivered and that certain delivery objectives are respected. The contributions of this paper are: a generic system model for event handling and an analysis of event distribution mechanisms with respect to timeliness and traffic metrics. The paper describes and discusses in detail the results based on simulations and provides guidelines for management functions of the Future Internet.

With the deployment of IPTV reliability for multicast is becoming an important research topic again. Even though it has been intensively investigated before, there is now an understanding of the deployment scenario and the application requirements that allows solutions to be evaluated in detail. We describe how to design a fast retransmission cache based on recent extensions of RTP. We have implemented a prototype intended for deployment in an access node and explain the necessary trade-offs in the design. The paper also contains a performance evaluation which shows the efficiency of the retransmission functionality to handle losses and its performance in congested networks.

TurfNet is an internetworking architecture that enables communication among autonomous and heterogeneous network domains. The architecture uses a global identity namespace and does not require global addressing or a common internetworking protocol. It integrates the new concept of dynamic network composition with other recent architectural concepts, such as decoupling locators from identifiers. This paper analyzes whether the TurfNet naming and interdomain routing mechanisms can scale to networks of the size of the global Internet. To the authors' knowledge, this is one of the first scalability analyses of any next-generation internetworking proposal based on today's Internet AS topology. It adapts existing research results on the topology of the Internet's autonomous system graph and related results that quantify typical traffic patterns to construct a realistic model of an Internet-like TurfNet.

SPam over Internet Telephony (SPIT) is expected to become a very serious issue in the next years. The threat is going to spin out from the well known email spam problem by bot nets being re-programmed to initiate not just spam emails but also Voice over IP (VoIP) calls. Preventing SPIT is a new problem, because many well-established methods for blocking email spam cannot be applied. Currently, several SPIT prevention methods are being proposed but SPIT prevention research is still at a very early stage. In this paper, we propose an innovative way to detect SPIT calls by comparing applying hidden Turing tests that compare them with typical human communication patterns. For passing these tests, significant resource consumptions at the SPIT generating bot nets would be required which contradicts the spammer's objective of placing as many SPIT calls as possible, The proposed method has several advantages compared to other methods that also interact with the caller. We validated its feasibility with a prototype implementation that we integrated into our modular VoIP security system called VoIP SEAL.

Ambient networks (ANs) are dynamically changing and heterogeneous as they consist of potentially large numbers of independent, heterogeneous mobile nodes, with spontaneous topologies that can logically interact with each other to share a common control space, known as the ambient control space. ANs are also flexible i.e. they can compose and decompose dynamically and automatically, for supporting the deployment of cross-domain (new) services. Thus, the AN architecture must be sophisticatedly designed to support such high level of dynamicity, heterogeneity and flexibility. We advocate the use of service specific overlay networks in ANs, that are created on-demand according to specific service requirements, to deliver, and to automatically adapt services to the dynamically changing user and network context. This paper presents a self-management approach to create, configure, adapt, contextualise, and finally teardown service specific overlay networks.

Self-configuration is regarded a key instrument to increase the efficiency of many management tasks. This work proposes and investigates the application of self-configuring mechanisms to decentralized network management in wireless networks. In particular, the load balancing function has been recently investigated and in this work we consider a distributed algorithm that can be executed autonomously by each Access Point. The contribution of this work, besides the definition of the algorithm, consists in an extensive evaluation of its performance. In particular, we study how the main issues in distributed self- configuring applications (namely stability, convergence, and overhead) can be controlled.

Most Internet telephony applications currently use either TCP or UDP to carry their voice-over-IP (VoIP) traffic. This choice can be problematic, because TCP is not well suited for interactive traffic and UDP is unresponsive to congestion. The IETF has recently standardized the new Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP). DCCP has been designed to carry media traffic and is congestion-controlled. This paper experimentally evaluates the voice quality that Internet telephony calls achieve over prototype implementations of basic DCCP and several DCCP variants, under different network conditions and with different codecs. It finds that the currently-specified DCCP variants perform less well than expected when compared to UDP and TCP. Based on an analysis of these results, the paper suggests several improvements to DCCP and experimentally validates that a prototype implementation of these modifications can significantly increase voice quality.

In this article, we apply autonomic and distributed management principles to wireless access networks. Most interesting is the application of autonomic properties and behaviors including adaptive, aware, and automatic operation in a decentralized setting. In particular, we present a generic and autonomic management architecture for decentralized management of wireless access networks, such as GERAN/UTRAN, E-UTRAN, WiMAX or WLAN. For evaluation purposes, we apply this architecture to the management of a Wireless LAN network, and we evaluate the architecture and some of the autonomic management functions through simulations, a prototype implementation and the setup of a real-world testbed for experimentation with the proposed management approach.

SPam over Internet telephony (SPIT) is expected to become a threat inhibiting the delivery of voice services over the Internet in the near future both because of its technical and economical characteristics. Experiences with email SPAM and its analogies with SPIT suggest that SPIT will be difficult to detect with a single detection method. Moreover, personalized management of detection strategies will be needed to increase effectiveness and to adapt the methods to special environments. This paper presents a modular framework for SPIT prevention designed to be easily manageable and extensible. Additionally, the framework makes use of a two-stage architecture in order to exploit the knowledge coming both from the signaling and from the media flows while still allowing real-time delivery of the media content to the user. Following the experience gained with our prototype implementation we also present the most important design issues we encountered and suggest solutions to these issues.

The Internet is currently evolving beyond what its architecture can support. Often, the mechanisms that allow the Internet to adapt to increasingly conflicting sets of new requirements break some of its basic design principles and can thus severely interfere with end-toend communication. This paper recognizes that increased autonomy of network regions is a key requirement for future internetworking. It outlines a new internetworking architecture that enables interoperation among a set of autonomous, heterogeneous network domains. The architecture is based on a global identity space and does not require global addressing or a shared internetworking protocol. It integrates the new concept of dynamic network composition with other recent architectural concepts, such as decoupling locators from identifiers. 1.

Self-configuration is a promising approach in network management. A self-configuring node is able to change some of its parameters autonomously according to changes of the environment (change of network conditions or information delivered from neighbour nodes). A network of self-configuring nodes promises increased scalability, low installation costs and better performances. On the other hand, such solutions introduce new possible cause of failures caused by complexity of fully distributed configuration algorithms: common drawbacks are loop configurations, oscillations of information changes and network traffic overload. At the end, the lacks of a common framework to monitor self-configuring devices constitutes a severe burden for providers to adopt self-configuring solutions in existing networks. This presentation proposes a novel architecture to monitor self-configuring devices, raise alarms when a bad behaviour is identified and filter some self-configuring operations. The architecture is based on an SNMP module to be integrated into a self-configuring node. The presentation completes with considerations to integrate the proposed framework with existing self-configuring nodes and network management systems

Lists the Autonomic Networks Program Committee ((in alphabetical order).

The development of future releases of third generation and fourth generation cellular network shows a clear indications that today's ATM-based radio access network (RAN) was replaced by an IP-based RAN particularly for reducing the cost compared to today's RANs. Managing an IP-based RAN with SNMP is a challenge, particularly concerning scalability. Already existing solutions for delegating management functions to managed nodes can achieve the required scalability, but they come with a big overhead of resource consumption and complexity. This paper presents a lean solution for health checking of managed nodes that achieves this goal by restricting itself to this purpose. The CHECK MIB module serves for remote configuration of heath check actions to be performed at a managed node and for retrieving health check results. Resource consumption is very low compared to already existing, more general technologies. Health checks can be specified easily by setting a very small number of objects and the implementation of the MIB module is lightweight.

The Internet is currently evolving beyond what its architecture can support. Often, the mechanisms that allow the Internet to adapt to increasingly conflicting sets of new requirements break some of its basic design principles and can thus severely interfere with end-to-end communication. This paper recognizes that increased autonomy of network regions is a key requirement for future internetworking. It outlines a new internetworking architecture that enables interoperation among a set of autonomous, heterogeneous network domains. The architecture is based on a global identity space and does not require global addressing or a shared internetworking protocol. It integrates the new concept of dynamic network composition with other recent architectural concepts, such as decoupling locators from identifiers.

Self-configuration of networks is the key to reducing operational costs and enhancing usability for inexperienced users. Various network technologies already perform self-configuration. For example, Ethernet is self-configuring. Since more and more networks are based on IP, and IP is used everywhere, IP routers must get to a state where they are plug-and-play as well. Naturally, this is not true for managed backbone or multi-service networks, but a high number of small to medium size businesses and home users do not want to deal with the hassle of configuring their networks and most of them are not able to. We propose a protocol for self-configuration of IPv6 networks.

Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS) is currently under standardization at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It basically reuses the MPLS control plane (IP routing and signaling) for various technologies such as fiber switching, DWDM, SONET, and packet MPLS. In this article, we propose a management architecture, which allows a service provider to offer customers various services based on a GMPLS infrastructure. The business model behind the architecture is comparable to the online flight ticket sales systems known.

The IETF has developed several specifications for policy-based configuration management. In addition, an infrastructure for distributed management by delegation has been specified. This paper combines key concepts developed in these two efforts and proposes a policy-based configuration management architecture built upon the distributed management infrastructure. Two prototype implementations for managing Differentiated Services are discussed and evaluated.

Multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) is in the process of standardization by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It is regarded as a technology for traffic engineering and QoS in IP-networks. In this paper, we address the management of MPLS networks, which is crucial for large networks. We decided to follow the IETF Policy Framework approach and extended the common information model (CIM) for policies with MPLS specific classes. MPLS introduces the notion of a label switched path (LSP), possibly covering an entire network, which calls for an extension of the IETF Policy Framework into the direction of network and service management issues. We address this by preparing a three-level policy architecture including managing on device, network, and service level using policies. However, the main focus of the paper is the management of MPLS with network-level policies. We describe a prototypical implementation of a policy-based management system for MPLS, operating on network elements represented in a network simulator.

Active networking, where network nodes perform customized processing of packets, is a rapidly expanding field of research. This paper investigates the realization of service management on a virtual active network (VAN), the key concept in our management framework for active networks (Brunner and Stadler, 1999). A VAN is a generic service offered by the VAN provider to the customer. The VAN abstraction transforms a multi-domain environment into a single domain view for a customer. The customer can install, run and supervise active services into a VAN, without interaction with the provider. In this paper, we describe a service management toolkit, which facilitates designing and managing services taking advantage of active networking technology for code reuse, code distribution, flexible event filtering, and programmable information aggregation. Further, we show how the service management toolkit is realized on ANET, an active networking testbed that we built.

Active networking, where network nodes perform customized processing of packets, is a rapidly expanding field of research. This paper is based on the assumption that active networking technology will mature to a point where it can be commercially deployed on a larger scale. We investigate the realization of service provisioning and service management in a telecommunication environment that is based on active networking technology, primarily with respect to customer-provider interactions. Compared to conventional networking technology, active networking concepts enable additional flexibility in supporting management tasks. We outline a framework that allows customers, on the one hand, to access and manage a service in a provider's domain, and, on the other hand, to outsource a service and its management to a service provider. Our framework has the properties of supporting: (1) generic, i.e., service-independent, interfaces for service provisioning and management; and (2) customized service abstractions and control functions, according to a customer's requirements. Further, we describe how some of the key concepts of this framework can be realized in an active networking testbed that we are in the process of building.