Application-layer transfer configurations play a crucial role in achieving desirable performance in high-speed networks. However, finding the optimal configuration for a given transfer task is a difficult problem as it depends on various factors including dataset characteristics, network settings, and background traffic. The state-of-the-art transfer tuning solutions rely on real-time sample transfers to evaluate various configurations and estimate the optimal one. However, existing approaches to run sample transfers incur high delay and measurement errors, thus significantly limit the efficiency of the transfer tuning algorithms. In this paper, we introduce adaptive feed forward deep neural network (DNN) to minimize the error rate of sample transfers without increasing their execution time. We ran 115K file transfers in four different high-speed networks and used their logs to train an adaptive DNN that can quickly and accurately predict the throughput of sample transfers by analyzing instantaneous throughput values. The results gathered in various networks with rich set of transfer configurations indicate that the proposed model reduces error rate by up to 50% compared to the state-of-the-art solutions while keeping the execution time low. We also show that one can further reduce delay or error rate by tuning hyperparameters of the model to meet specific needs of user or application. Finally, transfer learning analysis reveals that the model developed in one network would yield accurate results in other networks with similar transfer convergence characteristics, alleviating the needs to run an extensive data collection and model derivation efforts for each network.
more »
« less
Tiramisu: Fast Multilayer Network Verification
Today's distributed network control planes are highly sophisticated, with multiple interacting protocols operating at layers 2 and 3. The complexity makes network configurations highly complex and bug-prone. State-of-the-art tools that check if control plane bugs can lead to violations of key properties are either too slow, or do not model common network features. We develop a new, general multilayer graph control plane model that enables using fast, property-customized verification algorithms. Our tool, Tiramisu can verify if policies hold under failures for various real-world and synthetic configurations in < 0.08s in small networks and < 2.2s in large networks. Tiramisu is 2-600X faster than state-of-the-art without losing generality.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1763512
- PAR ID:
- 10187222
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 17th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
With rapid evolution of mobile core network (MCN) architectures, large-scale control-plane traffic (CPT) traces are critical to studying MCN design and performance optimization by the R&D community. The prior-art control-plane traffic generator SMM heavily relies on domain knowledge which requires re-design as the domain evolves. In this work, we study the feasibility of developing a high-fidelity MCN control plane traffic generator by leveraging generative ML models. We identify key challenges in synthesizing high-fidelity CPT including generic (to data-plane) requirements such as multimodality feature relationships and unique requirements such as stateful semantics and long-term (time-of-day) data variations. We show state-of-the-art, generative adversarial network (GAN)-based approaches shown to work well for data-plane traffic cannot meet these fidelity requirements of CPT, and develop a transformer-based model, CPT-GPT, that accurately captures complex dependencies among the samples in each traffic stream (control events by the same UE) without the need for GAN. Our evaluation of CPT-GPT on a large-scale control-plane traffic trace shows that (1) it does not rely on domain knowledge yet synthesizes control-plane traffic with comparable fidelity as SMM; (2) compared to the prior-art GAN-based approach, it reduces the fraction of streams that violate stateful semantics by two orders of magnitude, the max y-distance of sojourn time distributions of streams by 16.0%, and the transfer learning time in deriving new hourly models by 3.36×.more » « less
-
Software-defined networking (SDN) continues to grow in popularity because of its programmable and extensible control plane realized through network applications (apps). However, apps introduce significant security challenges that can systemically disrupt network operations, since apps must access or modify data in a shared control plane state. If our understanding of how such data propagate within the control plane is inadequate, apps can co-opt other apps, causing them to poison the control plane's integrity. We present a class of SDN control plane integrity attacks that we call cross-app poisoning (CAP), in which an unprivileged app manipulates the shared control plane state to trick a privileged app into taking actions on its behalf. We demonstrate how role-based access control (RBAC) schemes are insufficient for preventing such attacks because they neither track information flow nor enforce information flow control (IFC). We also present a defense, ProvSDN, that uses data provenance to track information flow and serves as an online reference monitor to prevent CAP attacks. We implement ProvSDN on the ONOS SDN controller and demonstrate that information flow can be tracked with low-latency overheads.more » « less
-
Network telemetry systems have become hybrid combinations of state-of-the-art stream processors and modern programmable data-plane devices. However, the existing designs of such systems have not focused on ensuring that these systems are also deployable in practice, i.e., able to scale and deal with the dynamics in real-world traffic and query workloads. Unfortunately, efforts to scale these hybrid systems are hampered by severe constraints on available compute resources in the data plane (e.g., memory, ALUs). Similarly, the limited runtime programmability of existing hardware data-plane targets critically affects efforts to make these systems robust. This paper presents the design and implementation of DynaMap, a new hybrid telemetry system that is both robust and scalable. By planning for telemetry queries dynamically, DynaMap allows the remapping of stateful dataflow operators to data-plane registers at runtime. We model the problem of mapping dataflow operators to data-plane targets formally and develop a new heuristic algorithm for solving this problem. We implement our algorithm in prototype and demonstrate its feasibility with existing hardware targets based on Intel Tofino. Using traffic workloads from different real-world production networks, we show that our prototype of DynaMap improves performance on average by 1-2 orders of magnitude over state-of-the-art hybrid systems that use only static query planning.more » « less
-
Despite the common belief that one-way streets are more operationally efficient due to their larger capacities, two-way street networks, especially those without left turns at intersections, can outperform one-way street networks when measuring operational performance at a network level (i.e., using total trip completion rates). However, some recent studies indicated that two-way street networks without left turns may be highly vulnerable to disruptive events inside the network. This study uses a kinematic-wave theory model to compare the performance of three network configurations – specifically, two-way, two-way without left turns, and one-way networks – under link disruptions. When road users have prior knowledge about the link disruption and can detour in advance, the two-way network with left turns performs the worst because it has the lowest capacity among the three network configurations. When road users have no prior knowledge about the link disruption and begin to detour only after approaching the disrupted link, two-way networks with and without left turns are both severely impacted. As two-way network with left turns is still constrained by its capacity, degradation in two-way network without left turns is mainly contributed to inflexibility, especially when links in the network center are disrupted. One-way networks appear to more robustly accommodate disruptions both with and without prior knowledge, compared to the other two network configurations.more » « less
An official website of the United States government

