Search for: All records

This paper describes a cloud infrastructure and virtual laboratories on P4 programmable data plane switches. P4 programmable data planes emerged as a technology that enables innovation in networking. P4 is a programming language used to describe how network packets are processed. This paper explains an entry-level training library on P4. The virtual laboratories introduce the learner to P4 and data plane concepts by providing step-by-step guides and exercises. The virtual laboratories are hosted in the Academic Cloud, a distributed platform that manages and orchestrates computing resources. Additionally, the paper describes a work in progress of P4 virtual laboratories that uses Intel Tofino switches. Lastly, the paper discusses the use of the Academic Cloud as a network testbed. 

Blockchain technology is the cornerstone of digital trust and systems’ decentralization. The necessity of eliminating trust in computing systems has triggered researchers to investigate the applicability of Blockchain to decentralize the conventional security models. Specifically, researchers continuously aim at minimizing trust in the well-known Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) model which currently requires a trusted Certificate Authority (CA) to sign digital certificates. Recently, the Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) was standardized as a certificate issuance automation protocol. It minimizes the human interaction by enabling certificates to be automatically requested, verified, and installed on servers. ACME only solved the automation issue, but the trust concerns remain as a trusted CA is required. In this paper we propose decentralizing the ACME protocol by using the Blockchain technology to enhance the current trust issues of the existing PKI model and to eliminate the need for a trusted CA. The system was implemented and tested on Ethereum Blockchain, and the results showed that the system is feasible in terms of cost, speed, and applicability on a wide range of devices including Internet of Things (IoT) devices. 

Previous studies have observed that TCP pacing evenly spacing out packets-minimizes traffic burstiness, reduces packet losses, and increases throughput. However, the main drawback of pacing is that the number of flows and the bottleneck link capacity must be known in advance. With this information, pacing is achieved by manually tuning sender nodes to send at rates that aggregate to the bottleneck capacity. This paper proposes a scheme based on programmable switches by which rates are dynamically adjusted. These switches store the network's state in the data plane and notify sender nodes to update their pacing rates when the network's state changes, e.g., a new flow joins or leaves the network. The scheme uses a custom protocol that is encapsulated inside the IP Options header field and thus is compatible with legacy switches (i.e., the scheme does not require all switches to be programmable). Furthermore, the processing overhead at programmable switches is minimal, as custom packets are only generated when a flow joins or leaves the network. Simulation results conducted in Mininet demonstrate that the proposed scheme is capable of dynamically notifying hosts to adapt the pacing rate with a minimum delay, increasing throughput, mitigating the TCP sawtooth behavior, and achieving better fairness among concurrent flows. The proposed scheme and preliminary results are particularly attractive to applications such as Science DMZ, where typically a small number of large flows must share the bandwidth capacity.