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.

Linux software routers have many configuration options, most of which have received little attention from researchers. Over time, multiqueue NICs, NUMA architectures, and many changes to the kernel have altered the forwarding landscape. Here we investigate (i) allocation of NIC queues to processing cores, (ii) batch sizes at various layers, (iii) receive and transmit packet steering, and (iv) how FIB performance scales. Our experiments focus on forwarding minimum size packets, which maximize the packet processing stress for the kernel, at 10 Gbps. Our investigation uses Bayesian factor analysis, experimental design techniques, and kernel density estimation to robustly measure each factor's effect on the mean packet forwarding rate and mean RTT. This study does not seek bleeding edge performance. Rather, we elucidate key decisions for packet forwarding performance on a widely used platform. Our results show irqbalance is quite volatile, hyperthreading can provide over a 1 MPPS boost in forwarding performance, larger queue sizes do not improve forwarding but can add non-trivial latency (up to 30 ms), and both receive packet steering and low values of rx-usecs can induce receive livelock.

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.

In recent years, overlay networks have become an important vehicle for delivering Internet applications. Overlay network nodes are typically implemented using general purpose servers or clusters. We investigate the performance benefits of more integrated architectures, combining general-purpose servers with high performance Network Processor (NP) subsystems. We focus on PlanetLab as our experimental context and report on the design and evaluation of an experimental PlanetLab platform capable of much higher levels of performance than typical system configurations. To make it easier for users to port applications, the system supports a fast path/slow path application structure that facilitates the mapping of the most performance-critical parts of an application onto an NP subsystem, while allowing the more complex control and exception-handling to be implemented within the programmer-friendly environment provided by conventional servers. We report on implementations of two sample applications, an IPv4 router, and a forwarding application for the Internet Indirection Infrastructure. We demonstrate an 80x improvement in packet processing rates and comparable reductions in latency.

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 report describes an ATM multipoint connection caching strategy (AMCC) to control the explosive growth of traffic within the network and at an endpoint in a large distributed interactive simulation (DIS) application such as a battlefield simulation. For very large DIS applications with 100000 entities, the current method of broadcasting information among entities will no longer be feasible due to the computational and network bandwidth limitations. Our scheme divides the simulation space into grids and each grid square or a set of grid squares forms a multicast group. Entities join the groups within their perception range and thus, they receive state updates only from entities within their perception range. The AMCC utilizes the unique capabilities of our dynamic multipoint ATM signaling protocol, CMAP. We have implemented the AMCC and have successfully demonstrated a small DIS battlefield simulation application running over our ATM testbed.

The authors give several examples of virtual path and virtual channel use for different types of communication, and then compare the two mechanisms. For most types of communication, both virtual path and virtual channel connections are more-or-less equally capable. However, for relatively high bandwidth communication involving more than five to ten participants, virtual path connections can more efficiently support some interconnection patterns. In general, the authors believe that both connection types are desirable and both should be extended to the client by network providers.>

A connection management access protocol (CMAP) for managing multipoint connections in high-speed packet switched networks is described. The protocol is targeted to broadband integrated services digital networks (BISDN) using the asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) communication standard. To establish a multipoint connection, a client first creates a call between itself and the network. The client creating a call is designated the owner of the call. Immediately after creation, the owner is the only endpoint participating in the call. Additional endpoints are added either by invitation from the owner, invitation from another client of the network, or by explicitly requesting to be added. These three modes are sufficient for supporting point-to-point communication (for example, a telephone call), many-to-many communication (for example, a conference call), one-to-many communication (for example, broadcast video), and many-to-one communication (for example, error logging).>