SMACK – A Smart ACKnowledgement Scheme for Broadcast Messages in Wireless

Networks

Problem:
Reliable multicast in layer3 is time consuming and costly if made reliable.

Objective:
- To present a way to utilize simultaneous transmissions to reduce cost of reliable
multicast by orders of magnitude.
- Can Speed up broadcast, anycast etc applications.

How:
They use ACK sending in the Physical layer using a single bit. The Access point
dedicates OFDM channels to each node so that they can send ACKs in case of wireless
broadcasts. ACK less broadcasts are used currently.

Process:
- The AP assigns ID to each member
- Broadcast is sent
- All nodes send out a 1 on the sub carrier assigned by the AP to acknowledge
- The AP senses medium once and then decodes all the ACKs by sending the
medium only once.

Protocol Provides:
- Robustness against varying signal power
- Robustness against interference

Yes they were able to back their claims with experimental results.
PortLand: A Scalable Fault-Tolerant Layer 2 Data Center Network Fabric

Problem:
Lack of scalability, Difficult Management, Inflexible communication and limited support
for VM migration in existing Data Center Networks.
Explicit problems addressed for future DCNs:
a) VM Migration should be easy from 1 physical machine to other in the DCN and it
should be transparent to ongoing flows, connections and applications with that
VM
b) Plug & Play switch support, no configuration required by administrator
c) Efficient communication between any two end hosts in the DCN
d) No forwarding loops
e) Failure detection and recovery should be rapid and efficient

Design Points that cater the above problems:

Fabric Manager:
-Maintains the Network topology in softstate
- ARP resolution
- Fault management
Pseudo MACs:
- Another address assigned to each machine other than its Actual MAC.
- PMAC addressing such that even the position is ascertained from the address

Proxy based ARP:

- All ARP requests are intercepted and sent to the Fabric Manager, which replies
with the mapping.

Distributed Location Discovery:

- Switches generate location discovery messages to know their position in network

Loop Free forwarding:

- Unidirectional flow of messages, either up or down, not lateral. Therefore no
loops are formed.

Fault tolerant Routing:

- If one switch discovers that the neighboring link or node is dead, it informs the
FM, which tells all the affected nodes so they recalculate the forwarding table.
VL2: A Scalable and Flexible Data Center Network

Problems:
1) Existing networks don’t have enough capacity between sensors
2) Traffic flooding in service affects other services traffic
3) Dynamic VM migration not possible.

Solution Requirements:
1) Uniform high capacity, no limitation on channel capacity, only due to NICs
2) Performance Isolation , Traffic of one service shouldn’t be affected by the traffic
of any other service.
3) Layer 2 Semantics in DCN Connectivity i.e flat addressing like in Ethernet.

Design:

VL2
- Valiant Load Balancing is used for uniform load distribution providing
performance isolation
- Each server given Application Specific Addresses (AAs) and Location Specific
Addresses (LAs). The AA to LA mapping is maintained by the Directory System.
Providing Transparent VM Migration.

Experimental results solve all the mentioned 3 problems and that too with existing
hardware, with VL2 client running on a machine.
Quantifying the Importance of Vantage Points Distribution in the Internet Topology
Measurement

Problem:
Internet measurements currently are based on synthetic data, oversimplified models and
data with limited or biased observer distributions, compromising the accuracy.

Objective:
To show effect of extensive sampling from a broad distribution on the resulting measured
topology and bias.

Contributions:
Two methods to design and analyze the topology coverage by vantage points
1) When system wide knowledge exists, gives near optimal assignment of
measurements to vantage points
2) When the system is oblivious and purely probabilistic.

Conclusion:
1) Diversity in physical location and types (Community, hardware, software, active
or passive) of vantage points is required for unbiased topology.
2) Analysis of the effects of broad distribution of vantage points over the
convergence of AS topology characteristics (some require over 40 VPS to
converge while some require very few).
3) Emperical questioning of bias claims against active trace route sampling.

Results:
Authors were not able to completely remove bias from the topology measurements, even
with distributed VPS.
ROAR: Increasing the Flexibility and Performance of Distributed Search

Problem:
Search engines partitioin the web index over several machines and consult each for fast
searches and to increase the throughput they replicate the machines.
A trade off between the partition level and replication exists because, increasing the
partitioning reduces the query completion time, and increasing the replication increases
throughput, but that also increases the sub-query generation costs to non negligible levels.

Proposed Solution:
ROAR – Rendezvous on a Ring algorithm, that allows on the fly reconfiguration of the
partition and replication

Design Constraints:
- Processing resources on each node are limited (upper bound on partitioning)
- Storage capacity on each is limited (upper bound on replication)
- For a dataset changing rapidly, increasing replication means updating more
machines rapidly, which reduces the capacity for each node to handle queries.

Design:
- ROAR used continuous circular ID Space, instead of a grid
- Stores data on each p (partitioning level) consecutive servers on the ring, with 1/p
chunk on each.
- When querying, request is forwarded to p equally spaced nodes starting from any
random point on the ring.
- Allows dynamic addition and removal of nodes on the fly, balancing load spikes
- Node ranges are expanded near to the neighbors range for load balancing.
Modeling and Understanding End-to-End Class of Service Policies in Operational
Networks

Problem:
High level complex policies to differentiate between CoS of VPN traffic is implemented
on low level routers configurations. Therefore the configuration process is tedious and
error prone.

Contributions:
- formal approach towards modeling CoS policies from router configuration files
- A computationally efficient tool that observes CoS treatments of specific flows
through several routers
- Validation of the approach in enabling applications such as troubleshooting,
auditing etc

Modeling:
- Each flowset is identified by a 6 tuple of IP header fields
- Flowsets go through the rulesets to get classified according to CoS
- The proposed rulesets are a Flat representation of a Recursive nature of rulesets

Tool for CoS observation is designed based on the model presented.

Evaluation and Validation

Results:
They validate their model and finish off the paper with some future enhancement
proposals.