The deployment and management of 5G Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) testbeds is a complex and time-consuming process that often requires significant manual effort and expertise. We present an open-source automation framework that simplifies testbed setup across diverse software platforms and environments. The framework automates setup and configuration, enables real-time monitoring and collection of key performance indicators (KPIs) via the O-RAN E2 interface with custom xApps, and enforces strict version control for reproducible experimentation. Clear documentation and consistent procedures let researchers quickly start experiments and share results, lowering barriers to entry and promoting collaboration within the 5G research community.

While being critical to the network management, the current state of the art in network measurement is inadequate, providing surprisingly little visibility into detailed network behaviors and often requiring high level of manual intervention to operate. Such a practice becomes increasingly ineffective as the networks grow both in size and complexity. In this paper, we propose vPROM, a vSwitch enhanced SDN programmable measurement framework that automates the measurement process, minimizes the measurement resource usage, and addresses several significant technical challenges faced by early works. vPROM leverages the SDN programmability and extends the Pyretic runtime system and OpenFlow network interface to achieve the measurement automation. The required measurement resources are minimized by only acquiring the necessary statistics, made possible with instrumented Open vSwitches1with user defined monitoring capability. By decoupling monitoring from routing, vPROM reduces the interference between the measurement applications and other applications, and eliminates the frequent involvement of the controller. A vPROM prototype is implemented with DDoS and port-scan detection applications. The performance of vPROM is evaluated and the comparison results with other existing programmable measurement approaches are also presented.

The Internet is subject to attacks due to vulnerabilities in its routing protocols. One proposed approach to attain greater security is to cryptographically protect network reachability announcements exchanged between Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routers. This study proposes and evaluates the performance and efficiency of various optimization algorithms for validation of digitally signed BGP updates. In particular, this investigation focuses on the BGPSEC (BGP with SECurity extensions) protocol, currently under consideration for standardization in the Internet Engineering Task Force. We analyze three basic BGPSEC update processing algorithms: Unoptimized, Cache Common Segments (CCS) optimization, and Best Path Only (BPO) optimization. We further propose and study cache management schemes to be used in conjunction with the CCS and BPO algorithms. The performance metrics used in the analyses are: (1) routing table convergence time after BGPSEC peering reset or router reboot events and (2) peak-second signature verification workload. Both analytical modeling and detailed trace-driven simulation were performed. Results show that the BPO algorithm is 330% to 628% faster than the unoptimized algorithm for routing table convergence in a typical Internet core-facing provider edge router.

In this paper, we present a discussion of some architectural principles pertaining to mapping distribution protocols that are common components of proposed designs to improve the scalability of future Internet routing tables. The efficiency of a mapping distribution protocol in terms of response time and the volume of traffic load it generates are important considerations. We consider how Egress Tunnel Routers (ETRs) can perform aggregation of end-point ID (EID) address space belonging to their downstream delivery networks, in spite of migration/re-homing of some subprefixes to other ETRs. This aggregation may be useful for reducing the processing load and memory consumption associated with mapping messages, especially in resource-constrained components of the mapping distribution system. Consequently, the proposed methods can also help improve response time (e.g., first packet delay). Some key architectural issues, their potential solutions and trade-offs are discussed. The overarching goal is to expose and discuss some subtleties in design considerations for mapping distribution and management.

We present a detailed study of the potential impact of border gateway protocol peering session attacks and the resulting exploitation of route flap damping (RFD) that cause network-wide routing disruptions. We consider canonical grid as well as down-sampled realistic autonomous system (AS) topologies and address the impact of various typical service provider routing policies. Our modeling focuses on three dimensions of routing performance sensitivity: 1) protocol aware attacks (e.g., tuned to RFD); 2) route selection policy; and 3) attack-region topology. Analytical results provide insights into the nature of the problem and potential impact of the attacks. Detailed packet-level simulation results complement the analytical models and provide many additional insights into specific protocol interactions and timing issues. Finally, we quantify the potential effect of the BGP graceful restart mechanism as a partial mitigation of the BGP vulnerability to peering session attacks.

In DiffServ packet processing, three fairness problems have been emphasized in recent research works: (i) fair sharing of bandwidth among flows with different round trip times (RTT) in aggregated flows of a class-type; (ii) fairness between responsive traffic (e.g., TCP) and nonresponsive traffic (e.g., UDP); and (iii) fair distribution of excess bandwidth among aggregates. In this paper we propose a fairness-guaranteed per class-type queueing and a hierarchical packet scheduler for DiffServ-aware-MPLS networks. The proposed scheme discriminates the packet flows according to the pre-configured DiffServ class-types, and applies different packet processing schemes and a hierarchical packet scheduler to per-class-type queue. We evaluate the proposed scheme with various DiffServ-aware-MPLS networking scenarios. From the simulation results, we can verify that the proposed scheme provides a good fairness to multiple class-types under DiffServ-aware-MPLS traffic engineering.

In this paper we present results, which have obtained by extensive simulations for mobile IP and session initiation protocol from the perspective of VoIP service in wireless Internet access. After illustrating the problem in these two protocols for diverse cases of mobility management, we propose an integrated model, to reduce the handover latency and packet loss during handover. This combination of network and application layer mobility management model reduces disruption time during handovers and provides fast handoff for ongoing conversations. Simulation results presented in this paper are based on the ns2 mobility software. However, since the current version of ns2 does not include SIP model for VoIP service, we add a suite of new features and procedures that are specific to this paper. The simulations results show that our proposed mechanisms achieve better performance than other protocols.

We investigate the performance of reservation mechanisms for optical burst switching (OBS) in multiple hop network environments. We first review current research on wavelength reservation schemes for OBS, and investigate the path length priority effect of existing just-enough-time (JET) scheme. Then, we propose a novel hop-by-hop priority increasing (HPI) scheme. The simulation results showed that the proposed scheme could avoid the path length priority effect and enhance the end-to-end throughput in multiple hop network environments.