We introduce Hermes, a general-purpose networking architecture built on an overlay of reconfigurable proxies. Hermes delegates networking responsibilities from applications and services to the overlay proxies. It employs a range of proxying and tunneling techniques, utilizes HTTP as its core component, and incorporates assisting components to facilitate service delivery, enhance communication, and improve end-users' experience. To substantiate these benefits, we prototyped Hermes and demonstrated its ability to efficiently address service and communication challenges. We showed that Hermes enables end-to-end solutions for compatibility with legacy applications and protocols and reliable delivery in highly disadvantaged networking conditions. Furthermore, Hermes demonstrated its ability to provide end-to-end, business-logic-driven handling of general IP traffic and to serve as a communication pipeline for Named Data Networking, facilitating the development and adoption of future networking architectures.

This paper systematically evaluates the performance of QUIC/HTTP3 (H3) and TCP/HTTP2 (H2) in proxy-enhanced environments. H3 integrates UDP-based flow-controlled streams, built-in TLS, multiplexing, and connection migration to better support modern web communication. While prior studies show that H3 can outperform or underperform H2 depending on network conditions, the role of proxies and connection migration remains underexplored. We assess a variety of H2 and H3 client implementations across, particularly in lossy networks and proxy setups. Our findings show that proxies can significantly enhance H2 performance, yielding a 90% improvement in single-stream downloads under severe impairments when used with the BBR congestion control algorithm. In contrast, proxies have minimal impact on H3, which maintains consistent performance due to its internal mechanisms. H3 excels under high-loss and high-latency conditions, leveraging connection migration and multiplexing to deliver up to 88.36% improvement in migration scenarios and 81.5% in extreme loss cases. While optimized H2 can match H3 in some settings, H3 is more robust overall, showing less sensitivity to proxies, impairments, and congestion control variations.

We have been working to create a novel and practical software infrastructure to enable networking researchers to develop, evaluate, and demonstrate networked systems, services, and protocols using modern real-world devices and platforms. As a first demonstration of this, we will show an Envoy sidecar overlay network supporting smartphone requested web traffic over a network with intermittent links with real time network monitoring and audience participation.

Networking testbeds have become an increasingly important part of the networking research cycle. One of the primary reasons for this is that testbeds offer researchers access to network conditions and environments which are very difficult to reproduce in a local laboratory. This work presents the design of the Open Network Laboratory (ONL) testbed. The underlying infrastructure of ONL is general enough to support resource extensibility and heterogeneity at a fundamental level. New types of resources (e.g., multicore PCs, FPGAs, network processors, etc) can be added to the testbed without modifying any testbed infrastructure software. Resource types can also be extended to support multiple distinct sets of functionality (e.g., an FPGA might act as a router, a switch, or a traffic generator). Moreover, users can dynamically add new resource extensions without any modification to the existing infrastructure.

Over the last decade, programmable Network Processors (NPs) have become widely used in Internet routers and other network components. NPs enable rapid development of complex packet processing functions as well as rapid response to changing requirements. In the network research community, the use of NPs has been limited by the challenges associated with learning to program these devices and with using them for substantial research projects. This paper reports on an extension to the Open Network Laboratory testbed that seeks to reduce these "barriers to entry" by providing a complete and highly configurable NP-based router that users can access remotely and use for network experiments. The base router includes support for IP route lookup and general packet filtering, as well as a flexible queueing sub-system and extensive support for performance monitoring. In addition, it provides a plugin environment that can be used to extend the router's functionality, enabling users to carry out significant network experiments with a relatively modest investment of time and effort. This paper describes our NP router and explains how it can be used. We provide several examples of network experiments that have been implemented using the plugin environment, and provide some baseline performance data to characterize the overall system performance. We also report that these routers have already been used for ten non-trivial projects in an advanced architecture course where most of the students had no prior experience using NPs.

The Open Network Laboratory (ONL) is a remotely accessible network testbed of high performance routers which has been designed with an eye towards ease of use for users from the naïve to the expert. The system is built around a set of high-performance routers that are extendible and easily configurable through the Remote Laboratory Interface (RLI), an intuitive graphical interface. The RLI also makes it easy to configure packet filters in the routers, assign flows or flow aggregates to separate queues with configurable QoS and attach hardware monitoring points to real-time charts. The RLI’s real-time charts and user data facility makes it easy to directly view the effects of traffic as it moves through a router, allowing the user to gain better insight into system behavior and create compelling demonstrations. Each port of the router is equipped with an embedded processor that supports software plugins which allow users to extend the system’s functionality. This paper describes the ONL and how it can be used in networking education. You should checkout our web site onl.arl.wustl.edu which includes a short video.

This paper presents and evaluates distributed queueing algorithms for regulating the flow of traffic through large, high performance routers. Distributed queueing has a similar objective to crossbar-scheduling mechanisms used in routers with relatively small port counts, and shares some common high level characteristics. However, the need to minimize communication overhead rules out the iterative methods that are typically used for crossbar scheduling, while the ability to sub-divide the available bandwidth among different ports provides a degree of freedom that is absent in the crossbar scheduling context, where inputs must be matched to outputs. Our algorithms are based on four ideas (1) backlog-proportional-allocation of output bandwidth, (2) urgency-proportional-allocation of input bandwidth, (3) dynamic reallocation of bandwidth and (4) deferred underflow. Our algorithms guarantee congestion-free operation of the switch fabric. Our performance results show that for uniform random traffic, even a very modest speedup is sufficient to reduce the loss of output link bandwidth due to sub-optimal rate allocation to negligible levels, and that even under extreme conditions, a speedup of two is sufficient to eliminate such bandwidth loss.