Experimentally-driven research is crucial to the evaluation of any networking technology. In this paper, we focus on research experiments with Mini-CCNx, a convenient yet high-fidelity prototyping tool to evaluate Information-Centric Networking (ICN) proposals that bring named pieces of content as the main element of networks. More specifically, Mini-CCNx is tailored for the Named Data Networking (NDN) model and fills an existing gap in generally available experimental platforms. Using container-based emulation and resource isolation techniques, Mini-CCNx appears as a flexible, scalable, high-fidelity, and low-cost tool in support of NDN research. To evaluate Mini-CCNx as a valid research platform, we first reproduce a series of experiments from the NDN literature. We then run routing experiments on an emulated version of the real NDN testbed and provide insights into open research topics such as behavior of the OSPFN routing protocol, forwarding strategies, and network resiliency.

The information society is facing a sharp increase in the amount of information driven by the plethora of new applications that sprouts all the time. The amount of data now circulating on the Internet is over zettabytes (ZB), resulting in a scenario defined in the literature as Big Data. In order to handle such challenging scenario, the deployed solutions rely not only on massive storage, memory and processing capacity installed in Data Centers (DC) maintained by big players all over the globe, but also on shrewd computational techniques, such as Big Table, MapReduce and Dynamo. In this context, this work presents a DC structure designed to support the similarity search. The proposed solution aims at concentrating similar data on servers physically close within a DC, accelerating the recovery of all data related to searches performed using a primitive get(k, sim), in which k represents the query identifier, i.e., the data used as reference, and sim a similarity level.

The semantic meaning of a content is frequently represented by content vectors in which each dimension represents an attribute of this content, such as, keywords in a text, colors in a picture or profile information in a social network. However, one important challenge in this semantic context is the storage and retrieval of similar contents, such as the search for similar images assisting a medical procedure. Based on it, this paper presents a new Distributed Hash Table (DHT), called Hamming DHT, in which Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) functions, specially the Random Hyperplane Hashing (RHH), are used to generate content identifiers, propitiating a scenario in which similar contents are stored in peers nearly located in the indexing space of the proposed DHT. The evaluations of this work simulate profiles in a social network to verify if the proposed DHT is capable of reducing the number of hops required in order to improve the recall in the context of a similarity search.

In literature, there are several methods to measure similarity between concepts in structures like simple ontologies, concept hierarchies, taxonomies, etc. These measures are used to search for similar concepts. In the Semantic Web, such structures are commonly used to classify data which opens the possibility of reasoning upon them and helps in conceptual searches. Besides that, the Locality Sensitive Hash (LSH) functions are used to store similar data close to each other in an index space. Each family of LSH functions is tied to a specific similarity function. In this paper we propose a method for combining the idea of conceptual similarity with LSH functions. This method permits the data classified as similar concepts be indexed close to each other respecting some metric. The main idea is to facilitate the conceptual searching for data semantically classified. This paper evaluates several methods of measuring the similarity between concepts in a simple ontology and discusses how they can be applied to an LSH function.

In this paper we present an in-network caching architecture based on content routers to improve the traffic efficiency in the Internet. The main idea is to provide a forwarding fabric where data requests are forwarded towards the closest caches in the network path. Conversely, data chunks from the servers are cached in the content routers along the path, serving further requests. In addition, content routers store a neighborhood mapping of available routers, leveraging resource discovery in the network proximity. Some benefits of the architecture include multi-source content retrieval, better traffic efficiency and gradual deployment. As a proof-of-concept, we implemented a content router prototype and evaluated it in different scenarios comparing the bandwidth, latency and neighborhood search. The experimental results show that the content router can leverage multi-source content retrieval with bandwidth reduction without incurring in increased latency.

The growing demand for ubiquitous computing lead manufactures to develop multi-band devices supporting different network access technologies, such as GSM, Wi-fi, and UMTS. Although these devices support different access technologies, they lack of native vertical handover support, breaking any ongoing connections whenever users switch between access technologies. In this paper we present a next-generation Internet architecture with native vertical handover support, providing mechanisms to support mobility between different access technologies without disruptions. The architecture introduces an identification layer that decouples the host identification from its location, enabling native mobility support for legacy applications. The identification layer employs cryptographic identifiers to identify end-hosts over the Internet and to provide security mechanisms for identity management during vertical handovers. As a proof of concept, a prototype was implemented and evaluated in different vertical handover scenarios in GSM, Wi-fi and wired domains.

Current security protocols such as IPSec and TLS/SSL provide security mechanisms to authenticate and protect the communication between end-hosts over the Internet. Nonetheless, new communication scenarios like mobility and heterogeneous networks have exposed some technical limitations of these protocols. Both protocols employ the IP address as end-host identifier to establish security associations between the parties, entangling the end-host identification with its topological location. In order to overcome these limitations, we propose the Identification Layer Security (IDSec), a security model to provide authentication based on public key cryptography with denial of service resistance capabilities and data integrity and confidentiality. IDSec introduces a new communication substrate based on cryptographic identifiers which natively support new services such as mobility and heterogeneous networks with security embedded in the identification layer. In order to validate the proposal, a prototype was implemented and evaluated, analyzing the performance of legacy applications in static and mobility scenarios.

A frequent subject in forums, academia and industry is the evolution of the Internet in terms of routing. Basically, the scalability in the Default Free Zone related to (1) the growing rate of the routing tables and (2) the convergence of the routing system, are pointed by routing experts as the main concerns of the current mechanism. Several approaches have emerged, but they normally require a mapping system to translate from identifiers to locators (IP). We contribute with this discussion by introducing our XOR-based Flat Routing mechanism for Internet-like topologies. Essentially, the proposed mechanism routes directly on top of flat ASes identifiers, eliminating the need for mapping systems. In this work we propose a mechanism for building the routing tables over the XOR-based scenario in conjunction with a reachability service developed using the concepts of Landmark and Bloom filters. The proposal is evaluated using our developed emulation tool under five different Internet-like topologies ranging from 512 to 8192 nodes.

Peer-to-peer systems provide a scalable content distribution environment where each peer contributes with a share of resources in the distributed system. The efficiency of peer-to-peer networks comes from the file segmentation procedure, allowing peers to redistribute small pieces of the original file as soon as they finish downloading them instead of waiting for the complete file download. Moreover, the decentralized fashion of the paradigm with multiple sources makes it scalable and robust under high churn. Due to the popularity of such systems, many attacks such as content pollution arose, targeting the content integrity by inserting bogus data in the network to increase the download time and bandwidth consumption. In this paper we present the piece fingerprinting mechanism, a new integrity verification procedure that algorithmically binds all pieces together and relates them to the complete file. Each data block resulted from the segmentation of a large file has a fingerprint indicating whether a block belongs to the content file and also allows the integrity verification of specific parts of the content. The mechanism allows the early detection and correction of the corrupted blocks only, reducing the download time and bandwidth consumption which would be spent re-downloading larger pieces. The analytical evaluation shows that the fingerprinting mechanism has low overhead, usually less than 1% of the file size, and can reduce the bandwidth consumption by 90% in the best case by saving the amount of bandwidth consumed from the re- downloaded pieces.

Flat routing is subject of many proposals found in the literature. One challenging task in this scenario is the flat identity space management since aggregation is not possible. The Landmark-based Flat Routing (LFR) proposal is an alternative to address the routing tables' growth in a scenario which (1) organizes the network in regions represented by landmarks and (2) adopts an XOR-based routing mechanism inside regions. In this work, Bloom filters are introduced to LFR as an effective mechanism to deal with two main aspects of flat routing. The first one is to advertise aggregated reachability information between landmark regions and the second combines the intra-region XOR-based mechanism with Bloom filters in order to reduce unnecessary walk at the flat binary space, opening up many possibilities for the Flat Routing scenario, especially for stretch reduction and scalability for disseminating ``reachability'' information. The evaluations were done in a regular mesh network topology with 256 nodes and the results show the advantages of having Bloom filters in both scenarios, highlighting the effectiveness of such mechanism for flat identifiers aggregation.

Computing history has shown that open, multi-layer hardware and software stacks encourage innovation and bring costs down. Only recently this trend is meeting the networking world with the availability of entire open source networking stacks being closer than ever. Towards this goal, we are working on QuagFlow, a transparent interplay between the popular Quagga open source routing suite and the low level vendor-independent OpenFlow interface. QuagFlow is a distributed system implemented as a NOX controller application and a series of slave daemons running along the virtual machines hosting the Quagga routing instances.

The mobile plane architecture (MPA) is a network architecture that provides micro-mobility in a network-centric way, that is, the burden of supporting micro-mobility is placed on the network and not on the mobile nodes. MPA employs an overlay network above an IPv4 or IPv6 transport network in order to direct traffic to the mobile nodes. The overlay network is built by establishing point-to-multipoint (P2MP) tunnels through the transport network. This paper presents an implementation of MPA over MPLS/GMPLS networks. It is shown that the combination of P2MP tunneling with label stacking is an effective way for providing mobility services in MPLS/GMPLS transport networks. Results obtained in a lab-sized network are presented as well.

In this paper we make the domain entity a first class citizen. The concept of Domain Identifiers (DIDs) is introduced to effectively bring the domains to the next generation Internet scenario. The paper presents an architecture to address challenging next generation Internet requirements such as node and domain mobility, multi-homing, security, network composition and inter-domain routing. Although our architecture supports all the mentioned requirements, the focus of this paper is specifically on node and domain mobility in order to evaluate and compare the advantages of having DIDs for facilitating the mobility. First, we present the generic Next Generation Internet architecture proposal and its envisioned scenario. Then, we show how to instantiate it to work together with the current Internet. We have developed a prototype to evaluate our proposal and we depict results related to node and domain mobility under this gradual deployment scenario using the Internet as the core.

This paper presents the design and implementation of the mobility plane architecture (MPA). MPA is a network architecture that provides micro-mobility in a network-centric way, that is, the burden of supporting micro-mobility is placed on the network and not on the mobile nodes. The implementation employs RSVP-TE to establish IP/IP and MPLS point-to-multipoint tunnels in order to direct traffic to the mobile nodes. DHCP is used for tracking the mobile node locations and RSVP-TE opaque data carries the location information to install routes to them. Results obtained in a lab-sized network and some quantitative comparisons between MPA and other related work are presented as well.

The current internetworking architecture presents some limitations to naturally support mobility, security and multi- homing. Among the limitations, the IP semantic overload seems to be a primary issue to be considered. In this paper we present a next generation internetworking architecture to overcome the IP semantic overload by introducing an identity layer located between the network and transport layers. This new layer provides a stable cryptographic identifier for end-hosts and seamlessly allows the deployment of new services, such as mobility, multi-homing and security. A prototype was implemented and evaluated considering some mobility scenarios, including intra-domain, inter-domain and simultaneous node mobility.

In response to the limitations of the Internet architecture when used for applications for which it was not originally designed, a series of clean slate efforts have emerged to shape the so-called future Internet. Recently, visionary voices have advised a shift in the networking problem under research, moving from seamless host-reachability to internetworking of information. We contribute to the healthy debate on future Internet design and discuss ongoing information oriented efforts. Inspired by recent works in Bloom-filterlike data structures, we propose the SPSwitch as a novel switching engine to make wire speed forwarding decisions on flat information labels. We address part of the scalability issues in a data-oriented forwarding layer by trading overdeliveries for state reduction and line speed operations.

The publish/subscribe communication paradigm is an appealing mechanism for efficient content retrieval due to the decoupling of data sources and consumers. However, the location decoupling nature of the paradigm opens security issues related to the content authentication and integrity since there is no binding between published content and its providers. In this paper we propose a new control plane called security plane, which is responsible for providing all essential security functionalities, such as efficient content authentication, data integrity and publication control. The security plane creates a binding between information providers and their contents, allowing secure content authentication by subscribers, mitigating security flaws such as fake content publication and data corruption.

Many applications that adapt themselves to available resources have lately become popular on the Internet, suggesting that absolute QoS levels are not essential for most applications. The proportional differentiation model (PDM) constitutes currently one of the main proposals for the next generation Internet and adds one more possibility for application adaptation. This paper investigates the PDM, situating it along other existing service proposals and presents the window based waiting-time priority (WBWTP) packet scheduling algorithm, which enables to reach the proportional differentiation model objectives with higher accuracy than the traditional waiting-time priority (WTP) and proportional average delay (PAD) algorithms.

The current internetworking architecture presents some limitations to naturally support mobility and multi-homing. Among the limitations, the IP semantic overload seems to be a primary issue to be considered. In this paper we present a next generation internetworking architecture to overcome the IP semantic overload by introducing an identification layer located between the network and transport layers. This new layer provides a stable identifier for end-hosts, enabling the natural deployment of new services, such as mobility, multi-homing and security embedded. We implemented a prototype and evaluated it considering the legacy application support in mobility scenarios.

Multimedia systems should deal with critical issues such as real-time requirements of audio and video. Such requirements can become more complex when applications are executed in different platforms including different technologies, such as Internet and Interactive Digital Television Systems. In such a context, this paper proposes a QoS management and specification model to support adaptation in middleware for distributed multimedia systems.

Distributed multimedia systems should deal with critical issues such as temporal requirements of audio and video. Such requirements can become more complex when applications are executed in interactive digital television systems, since there is a diversity of hardware devices, operating systems and communication technologies. In order to fulfil the requirements of such applications, their constituting components need to interact with each other, as well to consider QoS issues related to devices and transmission media. This paper presents a generic interconnection model that allows communication between components in heterogeneous and distributed multimedia environments. Besides, the model supports adaptation in the middleware layer, triggered by QoS and user requirements changes.

A distributed control plane architecture enhances transport networks with dynamic and flexible connection control. As a result, it allows the provisioning of advanced connectivity services, like Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), on layer 1 switching networks. Such Layer 1 VPN (LI VPN) services enable multiple customer networks to share a single transport network. In this work, we propose an architecture for LI VPN management. Our approach has been to use Policy-Based Management (PBM) to provide customers with some level of control and management over their LI VPNs. We also present a prototype implemented to validate the proposed architecture and discuss implications of policies for LI VPN configuration management.

In this paper we present a Web Services-based approach to provide connections between optical domains. The architecture we describe here consists of a virtual topology service, an end-to-end connection service and an end-to-end interdomain negotiation service. All of them were implemented using the Web services technology. In this work we shortly introduce the architecture and focus mainly on the performance analysis. In order to validate our approach, a prototype that implements the services mentioned above has been developed and evaluated in terms of time, scalability and bandwidth consumption to establish end-to-end interdomain optical connections.

Distributed multimedia systems should deal with a diversity of hardware devices and operating systems issues. In such a context, we present a component-based framework for configuration and management of resources of open, distributed multimedia systems. In order to provide a generic and reusable approach, the framework explores the concept of properties to establish configuration agreements among component requirements and platform features.

In this paper we present a policy-based admission control architecture responsible for managing the installation and aggregation of packet-based LSPs within lightpaths (optical LSPs). We have defined some policies in order to reduce the optical network overhead to remove and reroute lower priority LSPs. The architecture is composed of an admission control and a policy manager and the performed simulations indicated that the number of LSP removals is smaller when policies are applied.

This paper presents the Remotely Accessible Laboratory (REAL), a virtual laboratory accessible through the Internet. REAL allows a remote user to manipulate a mobile robot in a mode of interaction suitable to his or her level of expertise. A basic mode of interaction, dedicated to users with limited knowledge of robotics, supports interaction via teleoperation. In a more advanced level of interaction, expert users can plan and execute complex robotics experiments that exploit the full capabilities of the robot. In this mode of interaction, experiments in the field of autonomous navigation, environmental mapping, sensor fusion, mission planning, and robot control can be performed. Finally, a third mode of interaction allows a set of trainees to follow the interactions conducted by an instructor. The architecture of REAL departs from the commonplace World Wide Web applications, since it employs a sophisticated software architecture based on software components. This architecture presents a high degree of reusability that future developments in the field of Internet robots and virtual laboratories can take advantage of.

A real-time knowledge processing procedure is proposed for rule-based systems in general and control systems applications in particular. Distinguishing features of the procedure include a mechanism for rule base compression and an inference scheme based on matrix operators. The procedure is also amenable for schedulability analysis to provide response time warranty. An application concerning supervisory group control of elevators is also included to show the usefulness of the proposed procedure.

In the last years, with the evolution of the communication and processing technologies, the field of multimedia cooperative applications in open distributed environments is increasing steadily. Aiming at these environments, where services may be offered in an open manner, this work presents some results in the development of the Multiware Platform. The design of this platform combines ideas from both the RM-ODP (Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing) and existent industrial specifications and products for distributed processing (e.g. ANSAware and CORBA). The platform offers functionalities to support and facilitate the development, use and management of multimedia cooperative applications.>