Testbeds and Research Infrastructures for the Development of Networks and Communities

Centralized network control plane in SDN brings scalability and reliability problem to the network, therefore, the research of multi-controller is appeared. For improving the communication efficiency between the controller and the network device, this paper proposes a loose management strategy to dynamically adjust the frequency of interaction between controllers and network devices. Based on the above idea, firstly, this paper designed the scheme and algorithm of multi-controller loose management. Secondly, this paper quantitatively analyzed the advantages of multi-controller loose management algorithm by mathematically modeling the virtual network deployment success ratio and the management revenue between controllers and network devices. Finally, experiment results show that the multi-controller loose management idea can improve the communication efficiency between the controller and the network device and the controller management efficiency. Simulation results also show that mathematical model accurately predict the performance of loose management algorithm.

As experimenting with energy-aware techniques on large-scale production infrastructure is prohibitive, several traffic-engineering strategies have been evaluated using discrete-event simulation. The present work discusses (i) challenges towards building testbeds that allow researchers and practitioners to validate and evaluate the performance of energy-aware traffic-engineering strategies and (ii) requirements when porting simulations to testbeds. We discuss a proof-of-concept platform and an application that use and provide Software-Defined Network (SDN) services created on the Open Network Operating System (ONOS) to validate previously proposed energy-aware traffic engineering strategies. We detail the platform and illustrate how it has been used for performance evaluation.

Since the current SDN southbound interface level is low and programming situation is complex, it requires a high-level abstract programming language to simplify programming. First, this paper improves the NetCore programming language to generate NetCore-M language, so that it can support deployment of multi-policies combination including packet drop action. This paper describes in detail the syntax, semanteme, and implementation of NetCore-M language. Secondly, this paper describes the network policy conflict systematically and solves it. Finally, this paper shows that the modified multi-policies combination algorithm can effectively detect and prompt policies conflicts based on the implementation of the Pyretic project.

This paper describes advanced capabilities that were deployed recently in the ExoGENI testbed to offer increased flexibility in provisioning, modifying, and recovering the topologies and the configuration settings of the virtual systems, or slices, in which experiments are run. Using the analogy of building complex structures with LEGO blocks, we envision an environment in which users arbitrarily scale out, scale in, scale up, and scale down their topologies using various modular constructs of compute, storage, and network resources. Portions of topologies can be shut down and brought back up to support resiliency, repeatability, migration, and other needs of the control software or application. Distributed applications running inside of slices can require programmatic control over the evolution of the topology as the execution progresses. The introduced capabilities, slice modification and slice recovery, are used either with the user GUI or through the programmable APIs. These new features expand the range and ease of options available to cloud-control software and to application developers as they test their designs at scale.

Wireless sensor networks that support the mobility of nodes are finding applications in different areas such as healthcare, elderly care, and rehabilitation from total knee and hip replacement. However, these application areas also require reliable and high throughput networks. Considering the high fluctuation of link quality during mobility, protocols supporting mobile wireless sensor nodes should be rigorously tested to ensure that they produce predictable outcomes. In this paper we present a wireless sensor network testbed for carrying out repeated and reproducible experiments, independent of the application or protocol types which should be tested. The testbed consists of, among others, a server side control station and a client side traffic flow controller which coordinate inter- and intra-experiment activities. We fully implemented the testbed for the TinyOS and TelosB platforms. We employed Diddyborg robots for emulating different types of movements in indoor and outdoor environments. The paper includes also an extensive evaluation of the testbed.

Mimetic environments, which mimic actual networks including personal computers, network assets, etc., are required for cyber range or malware analysis. However, constructing various mimetic environments is costly and tedious because each environment has different network assets. Thus, we propose a building block system for constructing mimetic network environments for cyber security experiments. These building blocks provides a fine-grained way to manage disk images and files to reduce the construction cost. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of the building block system called Alfons.

While benefits of IoT are clearly stated the deployment of such devices in a large scale is still held back by technical challenges such as short communication distances. Recent long-range radio technologies such as Semtech’s LoRa are promising to deploy Low Power WAN at a very low-cost for a large variety of applications. The paper describes our proposed low-cost and open IoT gateway & devices for both robust and simple deployment. Quick appropriation & customization by third parties for test-bed deployment is of utmost importance and the whole proposed architecture addresses this issue from the very beginning of the design process.

Applications for VANETs will require seamless communication between vehicle-to-infrastructure and vehicle-to-vehicle. However, this is challenging because it is being done in the context of a highly mobile environment. Therefore, traditional handover techniques are inadequate due to the high velocity of the vehicle and the small coverage radius of Road-side Units. Hence in order to have seamless communication for these applications, a proactive approach needs to be carefully investigated. This requires measurements from a real testbed in order to enhance our understanding of the communication dynamics. This paper is about building and evaluating a prototype VANET network on the Middlesex University Hendon Campus, London to explore these issues. The testbed is being used to investigate better propagation models, road-critical safety applications as well as algorithms for traffic management. In addition, the Network Dwell Time of vehicles travelling in the coverage of the RSUs is measured to explore proactive handover and resource allocation mechanisms.

Nowadays, the energy consumption of data centers is one of the biggest challenges in order to reduce operational expenditure (OPEX) and the carbon dioxide footprint. Most efforts are investigating the modernization of air conditions and server hardware, but also the optimization of resource allocations. Moreover, virtual server are migrated from one physical host to another in order to be able to shutdown unused physical computer nodes or even an entire rack. The Adapting Service lifeCycle towards EfficienT Clouds (ASCETiC) project tries to tackle this issue in another way. This project develops a toolbox that provides libraries and components which can be used to develop energy efficient cloud software on all three layers of the usual could stack. Thus, power consumption can be reduced by deploying energy efficient software in the cloud. This paper presents the innovative ASCETiC testbed located at the Technical University in Berlin (TUB), which is the deveopment and evaluation eviroment for the afore metioned software.

IoT deployments and then related experiments tend to be highly heterogeneous leading to fragmented and non-interoperable silo solutions. Yet there is a growing need to interconnect such experiments to create rich infrastructures that will underpin the next generation of cross sector IoT applications in particular as using massive number of data. While research have been carried out for IoT test beds and interoperability for some infrastructures less has been done on the data. In this paper, we present the first step of the FIESTA certification method for federated semantic IoT test bed, which provides stakeholders with the means of assessing the interoperability of a given IoT testbed and how it can be federated with other ones to create large facility for experimenter. Focus is given on data and semantic context of the test beds and how they can interoperate together for larger experiments with data.

IT security for Industrial control systems or the Industrial Internet of Things is an emerging topic in research and development as well as for operators of real production facilities. In this paper, we will present the Fraunhofer IOSB IT Security Laboratory for industrial control systems, that enables security research, development and testing of products and training of IT security personnel. Due to its architecture based on both real hardware components and a flexible virtual environment, the IT Security Lab offers a realistic setup of today’s production facilities and at the same time a high flexibility with regard to future networking technologies and protocols.

Nowadays, the study of Quality of Service (QoS) in multimedia streaming is generally carried out by simulators. However, the results of these tests are not quite real. This forces researchers to work with approximations. In this paper, we implement a test bench to test the performance and assess the protocols and algorithms for multimedia delivery. This test bench let us evaluate the network parameters performance, by manipulating the devices under controlled conditions, and allow us to identify different application cases. We can confirm that the designed test bench gives us more real measures than a simulators, which allows us to do many types of tests with low cost.

3D fingerprint identification is an emerging biometric authentication method, which is powerful against spoofing attacks. For actualizing 3D fingerprint identification, this paper develops a 3D fingerprint minutiae cloud reconstruction technique based on 2D multiview touchless fingerprint images. This technique provides a practical solution for 2D minutiae matching for multiview fingerprint images, when traditional feature correspondence finding based on 2D SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transformation) feature points fails. In this case, developing a new 2D feature point correspondence establishment algorithm is necessary to cover the deficiency of the SIFT-based technique. In this paper, minutiae, a type of detailed ridge-valley features in fingerprint images, are utilized for the correspondence discovery. Furthermore, differential evolution, an efficient evolutionary computing framework is employed to directly infer the possible correspondence of minutiae sets from the different posed fingerprint images. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed direct 2D feature point correspondence discovery strategy is able to handle the cases when the SIFT-based matching fails. To further illustrate the advantages of the proposed algorithm, 3D fingerprint minutiae cloud construction is conducted based on the feature correspondence discovered by the proposed algorithm. The experiments on 2D different posed fingerprint image matching and 3D fingerprint minutiae cloud construction show that the proposed algorithm can be used as an alternation when SIFT-based matching fails.

How to achieve efficient data transmission in delay tolerant network (DTN) is an important issue to many wireless or mobile systems. In this study, we propose a new routing protocol to improve delivery rate and optimize delivery delay with low overhead in DTN. We extend the classic PROPHET routing protocol by a scheduling policy to increase delivery rate and reduce delivery delay in DTN. We try to improve the performance of traditional PROPHET from both storage and transmission. Moreover, we evaluate the performance of the scheduling protocol by ONE Simulator. The simulation result illustrates that the proposed protocol is able to achieve better performance compared with the classic protocols like PROPHET and Epidemic in several key aspects.

Quality of Service (QoS) Routing problem has been attracting considerable attention thanks to the rapid development of the high-speed communication network, image processing and computer science. In the past decades, many Quality of Service Routing algorithms were presented based on the QoS requirements and the resource constraints.

The idea of the inverse optimization problem is to modify the given or estimated parameters such that the given feasible solution became an optimal solution. The modification costs are measured by different norms, such as \(l_1\) norm, \(l_2\) norm, \(l_\infty \) norm, Hamming distance and so on.

In this paper, we consider the inverse multicast quality of service routing problems under the weighted \(l_1\) norm. We present combinatorial algorithms which can be finished in strongly polynomial time.

Broadcasting is one of common data dissemination techniques in wireless ad hoc networks. Thus, it is critical to improve the broadcast efficiency. Flooding, which is simple but has reliable coverage, results in high broadcast redundancy, channel contending and message collision when the network is densely distributed. In this paper, a new broadcast algorithm named as distance and cooperation based broadcast (DCBB) is proposed. In DCBB, four neighbor nodes at most are determined to forward broadcast packets based on the number of neighbors and the distance between neighbors. Redundancy can be reduced by limiting the number of relay nodes. And, through the time-division forwarding scheme, channel contending is reduced and the network utilization is improved effectively. Moreover, due to the limited number of relay nodes, DCBB saves energy of nodes and prolongs the network lifetime. The simulation results show that DCBB achieves higher reachability and lower retransmitted ratio compared to dynamic probabilistic broadcasting algorithms (DP). Meanwhile, the average maximum end-to-end delay is significantly decreased. Therefore, DCBB is applicable to densely distributed network environment.