Resilience, survivability, and heterogeneity in the postmodern internet

Abstract

Society increasingly relies on computer networks in general, and the Internet in particular. Consumers rely on networks for access to information and services, personal finance, and for communication with others. The Internet has become indispensable to the routine operation of businesses and to the global economy. The military depends on network centric operations and warfare. Governments depend on networks for their daily operation, service delivery, and response to natural disaster and terrorist attacks. Furthermore, the Internet is being used in ways not anticipated by its designers and evolution of the protocols, in particular, TCP, IP, BGP, DNS, and HTTP. Emerging application paradigms and mashups, coupled with usage scenarios that are increasingly disconnected and mobile, challenge the current architecture. This has been recognised by research and development initiatives including NSF FIND (Future Internet Design), GENI (Global Environments for Network Innovation), and EU FIRE (Future Internet Research and Experimentation). This presentation will focus on two key aspects of the future Internet: resilience and heterogeneity. Resilience: The consequences to disruption of the Internet are increasingly severe, and threaten the lives of individuals, the financial health of business, and the economic stability and security of nations and the world. With the increasing importance of the Internet, so follows its attractiveness as a target from bad guys: recreational and professional crackers, terrorists, and from information warfare. The EU FIRE ResumeNet project is exploring resilience and survivability as critical properties of the future Internet architecture. Heterogeneity: New applications and usage scenarios stress the Internet architecture that has evolved assuming a stable wired infrastructure. While the current hourglass waist provided by IP, DNS, and BGP has served the Internet well, the demand for heterogeneity stresses the least-common-denominator of the waist. The NSF FIND Postmodern Internet (PoMo) project is exploring heterogeneity as a first-class citizen in the Postmodern Internet, in which a new internetworking protocol serves as the glue for heterogenous realms with explicit support for trust and policy boundaries. The Great Plains Environment for Network Innovation (GpENI) is constructing part of the GENI infrastructure, which will in part be used as a platform to test and evaluate ResumeNet and PoMo architecture. Additionally, research in two domain-specific realms will be described. Highly Dynamic Airborne Networking: Highly dynamic mobile wireless networks present unique challenges to end-toxiii end communication, particularly caused by the time varying connectivity of high-velocity nodes combined with the unreliability of the wireless communication channel. Addressing these challenges requires the design of new protocols and mechanisms specific to this environment. Our research explores the tradeoffs in the location of functionality such as error control and location management for high-velocity multihop airborne sensor networks and presents cross-layer optimizations between the MAC, link, network, and transport layers to enable a domain specific network architecture, which provides high reliability for telemetry applications. We have designed new transport, network, and routing protocols for this environment: TCP-friendly AeroTP, IP-compatible AeroNP, and AeroRP, and show significant performance improvement over the traditional TCP/IP/MANET protocol stack. Weather Disruption-Tolerant Millimeter-Wave Mesh Networking: Millimeter-wave networks have the potential to supplement fiber in providing high-speed Internet access, as well as backhaul for emerging mobile 3G and 4G services. However, due to the high frequency of operation (70-90 GHz), such networks are highly susceptible to attenuation from rain. We present several mechanisms to overcome the disruptive effects of rain storms on network connectivity and service reliability. A resilient mesh topology with cross-layering between the physical and network layer has the capability to self-optimise under the presence of unstable links. We present a novel domain-specific predictive routing algorithm P-WARP that uses real-time radar data to dynamically route traffic around link failures as well as a modified link-state algorithm XL-OSPF that uses cross-layering to achieve resilient routing. Simulations are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms based on data from real storms in the midwest US.