Hot Topics Next Generation Internet

1. Hot TopicsNext Generation Internet Michael Wilson mlw2@arl.wustl.edu

2. Contents • Internet Ossification • Clean Slate • Clean Slate Project • Overlays • Planetlab • Underlays/Virtualization • Diversified Internet Architecture • GENI • Global Environment for Network Innovation

3. Contents • Internet Ossification • Clean Slate • Clean Slate Project • Overlays • Planetlab • Underlays/Virtualization • Diversified Internet Architecture • GENI • Global Environment for Network Innovation

4. Internet Ossification • A bit of Internet History…. • “...A network of such centers, connected to one another by wide-band communication lines and to individual users by leased-wire services.” – JCR Licklider (1960) • BBN’s IMP • TCP/IP (1978) • DNS (1983) • NSFNet (1987) • WWW (1993) • Google (1998)

5. Internet Ossification • Barriers to Innovation • Immense scale of the Internet • Many, many stakeholders • Critical dependencies • Tension between innovation and backward compatibility • Incremental changes of limited value • Truly innovative, disruptive changes nearly impossible • Downside of Incremental changes • Increased Complexity (bandaids on bandaids on bandaids) • Decreasing opportunity for incremental change • Inability to change underlying assumptions

6. Internet Ossification • Approaches to Internet Innovation • Clean Slate • Accept that change will be disruptive and redesign from scratch. Eventually, the cost of the status quo will be more than the cost of disruption during migration. • Overlays • Create a network on top of today’s Internet, and make your changes there. If it’s a stunning success, downward migration will follow. • Underlays • Create a new network platform on top of which many competing overlay networks run, isolated from each other.

7. Contents • Internet Ossification • Clean Slate • Clean Slate Project • Overlays • Planetlab • Underlays/Virtualization • Diversified Internet Architecture • GENI • Global Environment for Network Innovation

8. Clean Slate Program • Program hosted out of Stanford • Emphasis on long-term goals and motivated by two questions: • “With what we know today, if we were to start again with a clean slate, how would we design a global communications infrastructure?” • “How should the Internet look in 15 years?” • Fairly recent program, September 2006. • Results still “half baked or a tenth baked” according to researchers in the program • Some prior work in the older 100x100 program

9. Clean Slate Program • Currently 7 major areas of research: • Flow-level Models for the Internet • Wireless Spectrum Usage • Fast Dynamic Optical Light Paths • Enterprise Network Security • Rate Control Protocol • NetFPGA Platform • Web Security Projects

10. Clean Slate Program • Flow-level Models for the Internet • Motivation: Internet design validation • Simulation • more accurate but scales poorly to very large networks. • Theoretical models are lacking in two major ways • No end-to-end semantics • No flow-level dynamics • One of the least developed of the program areas (no publications yet) • Expect to see some in the next few years!

11. Clean Slate Program • Wireless Spectrum Usage • Motivation: Wireless spectrum use is inefficient • Inefficiency is due to out-dated FCC regulation of the spectrum • New model examines spectrum allocation by way of: • Game Theory • Distributed Control • Current results are in game theory • “Competition in Wireless Systems via Bayesian Interference Games” - Sachin Adlakha, Ramesh Johari, Andrea Goldsmith (still in peer review) • Demonstrates Nash equilibria for “interference games” with incomplete information. Shows a need for a regulatory protocol to avoid a suboptimal equilibrium.

12. Clean Slate Program • Fast Dynamic Optical Light Paths • Motivation: Internet backbone routers are connected by static circuits • Requires overprovisioning (capacity and computation) • Serious problem with cost, power consumption, heat dissipation • Suggestion • Use photonic switching in the core • One tenth the cost and power, 10x speed • Make the transport layer aware of switching possibilities • Access routers dynamically set up and tear down paths through a core optical mesh

13. Clean Slate Program • Enterprise Network Security • Motivation: Enterprise network management is complex and error prone • Security is usually dependant on specialized middleboxes • Heterogeneous device management interfaces • New management architecture: Ethane • Policy declared over high-level names • Traffic paths determined by policy • Strong binding between packet and origin • Published in SigComm 2007“Ethane: Taking Control of the Enterprise”

14. Clean Slate Program • Ethane (cont’d) • Ethane is a real system in use at Stanford • Centralized control architecture • Experimental results show management scales to at least 25,000 nodes on a single commodity PC • Low-level switches have flow tables that describe allowable traffic • Traffic not matching any existing flow is forwarded to controller • Controller allows or denies flow, establishes new filters in switches along the path and forwards packet along • Ethane switches implemented in: • 802.11g wireless (OpenWRT) • NetFPGA Card • Linux PC (for rapid deployment) • Ethane switches are simpler than full ethernet switches Figure from SigComm07 Ethane Paper

15. Clean Slate Program • Rate Control Protocol (RCP) • Motivation: Current congestion control is inefficient for shorter flows • 90% of flows never leave Slow Start • STCP/FastTCP/XCP are inefficient for today’s typical flow (1000 packets) • RCP – Processor Sharing for rate control • Packets carry rate estimates • Each router estimates number of flows • If fair rate is less than current rate seen in packet, overwrite it • Performs well in tests • Published in numerous conferences, including SigComm CCR 06, Hotnets-IV, International Workshop on QoS (IWQoS05), Infocom06 workshop “The Terabits Challenge”, and Dr. Nandita Dukkipati’s Stanford dissertation.

16. Clean Slate Program • NetFPGA Platform • Motivation: Hardware acceleration of network algorithms • PCI-based FPGA with 4x1Gbps ethernet ports • On-board queuing • 3Gbps board-to-boardinterconnection • Commercially available • Published (MSE'2007) • Used to teach a classin building InternetRouters From the NetFPGA Infosheet

17. Clean Slate Program • Web Security Projects • Loosely affiliated with the Clean Slate Program • Motivation: Attackers target web users • Phishing by spoofed sites, context aware phishing, and password theft • Browser extensions for anti-phishing • SpoofGuard: detect spoofed sites and warn the user • PwdHash: generate phishing-resistant passwords • SafeCache, SafeHistory : segment browser cache by origin • Publications: SpoofGuard [NDSS’04], PwdHash [Usenix Security Symposium ’05], SafeCache/SafeHistory [ACM WWW ’06]

18. Clean Slate Program • Personal thoughts • Pro: • Well-motivated projects with good contributions • In conjunction with other projects, Clean Slate offers some tremendous resources. • Con: • Deployment strategy is weak. Particularly for the more radical suggestions (E.g., RCP) how can we obtain wide deployment? • Some of the single-domain projects can be deployed (Ethane, web browser security) • Approach is somewhat scattershot. There is no “big picture.” • On the plus side, this allows focus on the most important individual projects.

19. Contents • Internet Ossification • Clean Slate • Clean Slate Project • Overlays • Planetlab • Underlays/Virtualization • Diversified Internet Architecture • GENI • Global Environment for Network Innovation

20. Overlays • PlanetLab • For researchers, this is the most important overlay to know! • Overlay network testbed • Researchers can request a slice of the overlay network for experiments with large-scale services. • Deployment platform • Once a new service has been created and tested, it can support a client base of actual users. • The paradigm: Experiment to Deployment

21. Overlays • What is PlanetLab? • Planetlab consists of a large number (>800) of nodes distributed around the world. • Nodes are hosted at participating institutions and companies, with peering links on most major backbone providers • Researchers allocate a slice of Planetlab resources • A slice: a set of processing nodes • communicate with each other over UDP tunnels (transparent to the experimenter) • All nodes are managed by Planetlab Central (Princeton) • Imaged-based network boot • Uniform administration • Thorough logging for accountability

22. Overlays Slices Diagram courtesy Larry Peterson’s Planetlab Presentation

23. Overlays Slices Diagram courtesy Larry Peterson’s Planetlab Presentation

24. Overlays Per-Node View Node Mgr Local Admin VM1 VM2 VMn … Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) Diagram courtesy Larry Peterson’s Planetlab Presentation

25. Overlays • Uses of PlanetLab • Too many to list, but some of the major services are: • Content Nistribution Networks (CDN) (at least 4) • Distributed Hash Table (DHT) (2) • DHT-based Name Resolution (1) • Location Service (1) • Anycast network (1) • File transfer networks (4, 2 experiments not running) • Network diagnostics (5) • Routing overlay (4) • Anonymous communication overlay (2) • PlanetLab lists 54 papers related to or enabled by Planetlab,and 7 PhDs.

26. Overlays • Other overlays • Colyseus • DHT-based overlay designed to ease latency constraints by leveraging tolerance for weak consistency. “Colyseus: A Distributed Architecture for Online Multiplayer Games” [NSDI ’06] • Bittorrent • Peer-to-peer file transfer. Bittorrent was designed pragmatically, with ad hoc principles. Current research is focused on understanding all of the implications, such as impact on ISPs. • Akamai • Unquestionably the most successful CDN. Networking researchers study Akamai to determine what makes this CDN so successful. One interesting paper is “Drafting Behind Akamai” [SigComm ’06], which showed how one-hop routing overlays could use Akamai redirections for improved network performance.

27. Overlays • Personal thoughts • Pro: • Allow for immediate deployment and testing • Allow for application-aware network forwarding • Con: • Underneath, it’s still the same old Internet with the same old flaws (No QoS, no network-level security) • …but what about dedicated links? • Nothing truly disruptive can be deployed on an overlay without impacting the Internet

28. Overlays • Overlay Hosting Services • What if we had dedicated bandwidth connecting distributed overlay nodes? • Overcomes the QoS problem! • Last mile could be short-hop IP tunnels • Current barrier to innovative networks is deployment cost. • Single organization could implement an overlay hosting service • Entrepreneurs could contract with the hosting service to deploy new overlay networks • Who’d want such a thing? GameRail comes to mind…

29. Contents • Internet Ossification • Clean Slate • Clean Slate Project • Overlays • Planetlab • Underlays/Virtualization • Diversified Internet Architecture • GENI • Global Environment for Network Innovation

30. Underlays/Virtualization • Diversified Internet Architecture • Project here at ARL, Washington University • General Concept • Provide a common substrate on top of which new networks will run • Metanetworks – “Virtual” is so overloaded today that we’ll co-opt a new name. • Today’s Internet would run as an overlay on top of the substrate • Other metanets would share the same infrastructure • Strong isolation guarantees • Substrate provides only resource provisioning • Substrate platforms host metarouters • Metarouters connected by provisioned metalinks • Metarouters and metalinks dynamically provisioned on request

31. Underlays/Virtualization substrate link metalink substrate platform meta router substrate links may run over Ethernet, IP, MPLS, . . . metanetprotocol stack

32. ISPs become substratedomains metanetsspan multipledomains Underlays/Virtualization

33. Underlays/Virtualization • Minimize the substrate • Substrate will be hard to change • Keep it simple, allow metanets to provide complex services • Provide raw resources to metanets, and nothing else! • Support diversity of resource types • Metanets provide all interesting functionality • Host mobility: metanet requests metalink changes as hosts move • Security: substrate enables metanets to provide security • Spoofless networks: metalinks provide point-to-point connectivity • End-to-end delivery: metanet handles routing, reliability, etc.

34. Underlays/Virtualization • What’s new here? • Resource provisioning is a core concept. • All metalinks have performance guarantees, although “Best Effort” is a valid option • Metalinks extend all the way to the network edge • Hosting platforms are open for metarouters • Isolation is strictly enforced • …unless a metanet wants to interact with another metanet! • Barriers to innovation are reduced • Metanet providers lease resources from substrate providers • 12-month lease on 4 metarouters and 50 metalinks: cheaper than running miles of cable! • Pay for right now… or make long-term leases for long-term plans

35. Underlays/Virtualization • Personal thoughts • Pro: • No longer such a thing as a disruptive technology • Denial of Service attacks mitigated – isolation and leased resources • Barriers to innovation reduced • Maintains backward compatibility – today’s Internet makes an acceptable metanet • Provides a deployment direction • All of the Clean Slate projects help support a Diversified Internet • Con: • Years from development, let alone deployment • Virtualized platforms are always slower or more expensive than native platforms.

36. Contents • Internet Ossification • Clean Slate • Clean Slate Project • Overlays • Planetlab • Underlays • Diversified Internet Architecture • GENI • Global Environment for Network Innovation

37. GENI • GENI • Global Environment for Network Innovation • NSF funded program to develop a large scale experimental facility for network innovation. Compatibility with the Internet is not required. • Many ideas from PlanetLab – virtualization still key • Focus is on the network, not applications • Security, Mobility • Resource control, Isolation • High performance platforms (10Gbps)

38. GENI • Goals: • Slices, like PlanetLab • Wide deployment, like PlanetLab • Experiment to Deployment, like PlanetLab • Resource Broker, like the DIA • Isolation, like the DIA • Enable “Clean Slate” types of experiments • Instrumentation / Sensors – to track experiments • Is GENI the next Internet? • Maybe, maybe not. GENI is for experimentation. However, the ideas developed in GENI will certainly be a part of it.

39. Conclusions • These are some of the approaches to the Next-Gen Internet architecture. • Clean Slate • Overlays • Underlays/Virtualization • Right now, PlanetLab gives the best “immediate gratification.” • GENI aims to be the next step.

40. Questions? Questions?

41. Supplemental Slides

42. RCP Algorithm From Nandita Dukkipati’s presentation on RCP