During the past decade, the packet classification problem has been widely studied to accelerate network applications such as access control, traffic engineering and intrusion detection. In our research, we found that although a great number of packet classification algorithms have been proposed in recent years, unfortunately most of them stagnate in mathematical analysis or software simulation stages and few of them have been implemented in commercial products as a generic solution. To fill the gap between theory and practice, in this paper, we propose a novel packet classification algorithm named HyperSplit. Compared to the well-known HiCuts and HSM algorithms, HyperSplit achieves superior performance in terms of classification speed, memory usage and preprocessing time. The practicability of the proposed algorithm is manifested by two facts in our test: HyperSplit is the only algorithm that can successfully handle all the rule sets; HyperSplit is also the only algorithm that reaches more than 6Gbps throughput on the Octeon3860 multi-core platform when tested with 64-byte Ethernet packets against 10K ACL rules.

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Packet Classification Algorithms: From Theory to Practice

Hypervisors use software switches to steer packets to and from virtual machines (VMs). These switches frequently need upgrading and customization—to support new protocol headers or encapsulations for tunneling and overlays, to improve measurement and debugging features, and even to add middlebox-like functions. Software switches are typically based on a large body of code, including kernel code, and changing the switch is a formidable undertaking requiring domain mastery of network protocol design and developing, testing, and maintaining a large, complex codebase. Changing how a software switch forwards packets should not require intimate knowledge of its implementation. Instead, it should be possible to specify how packets are processed and forwarded in a high-level domain-specific language (DSL) such as P4, and compiled to run on a software switch. We present PISCES, a software switch derived from Open vSwitch (OVS), a hard-wired hypervisor switch, whose behavior is customized using P4. PISCES is not hard-wired to specific protocols; this independence makes it easy to add new features. We also show how the compiler can analyze the high-level specification to optimize forwarding performance. Our evaluation shows that PISCES performs comparably to OVS and that PISCES programs are about 40 times shorter than equivalent changes to OVS source code.

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PISCES: A Programmable, Protocol-Independent Software Switch

Fixed and mobile telecom operators, enterprise network operators and cloud providers strive to face the challenging demands coming from the evolution of IP networks (e.g., huge bandwidth requirements, integration of billions of devices and millions of services in the cloud). Proposed in the early 2010s, Segment Routing (SR) architecture helps face these challenging demands, and it is currently being adopted and deployed. SR architecture is based on the concept of source routing and has interesting scalability properties, as it dramatically reduces the amount of state information to be configured in the core nodes to support complex services. SR architecture was first implemented with the MPLS dataplane and then, quite recently, with the IPv6 dataplane (SRv6). IPv6 SR architecture (SRv6) has been extended from the simple steering of packets across nodes to a general network programming approach, making it very suitable for use cases such as Service Function Chaining and Network Function Virtualization. In this article, we present a tutorial and a comprehensive survey on SR technology, analyzing standardization efforts, patents, research activities and implementation results. We start with an introduction on the motivations for Segment Routing and an overview of its evolution and standardization. Then, we provide a tutorial on Segment Routing technology, with a focus on the novel SRv6 solution. We discuss the standardization efforts and the patents providing details on the most important documents and mentioning other ongoing activities. We then thoroughly analyze research activities according to a taxonomy. We have identified 8 main categories during our analysis of the current state of play: Monitoring, Traffic Engineering, Failure Recovery, Centrally Controlled Architectures, Path Encoding, Network Programming, Performance Evaluation and Miscellaneous. We report the current status of SR deployments in production networks and of SR implementations (including several open source projects). Finally, we report our experience from this survey work and we identify a set of future research directions related to Segment Routing.

Segment Routing: A Comprehensive Survey of Research Activities, Standardization Efforts, and Implementation Results

Segment routing (SR) has emerged as a promising source-routing methodology to overcome the challenges in the current routing schemes It has received noticeable attention both in industry and academia, due to its flexibility, scalability, and applicability, especially in software defined networks The emerging cloud services require strict service level agreements such as packet loss, delay, and jitter Studies have shown that traditional network architectures lack the essential flexibility and scalability to offer these services To combat this, a more flexible and agile routing paradigm of SR enables a source node to steer an incoming packet along a performance engineered path represented as an ordered list of instructions called segment list This is encoded as a multiprotocol label switching label stack or an IPv6 address list in the packet header This paper provides a comprehensive review of the novel SR technology by describing its architecture, operations, and key applications to date SR paradigm can be effectively applied to a wide range of network applications, such as traffic engineering, network resiliency, network monitoring, and service function chaining, to achieve efficient network solutions Furthermore, this paper identifies an interesting set of future research directions and open issues that can help realize the full potential of the emergent SR paradigm

Segment Routing in Software Defined Networks: A Survey

Different from traditional IP networks, named data networking (NDN) based on the named content can realize fast content retrieval and delivery. As one of the most important architectures for the future Internet, NDN needs flexible, effective, and efficient transport control strategies, which are crucial for widely development of NDN. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey and research challenges on transport control of NDN for the first of time. We first provide an introduction of NDN and its data transport process. Then, the essential differences of NDN transport control compared with IP transport control are analyzed and compared from three perspectives: users side, routers, and network provider. Next, an in-depth taxonomy and classification of NDN recent transport control proposals is given. Finally, we present some research challenges and broader perspectives.

Transport Control Strategies in Named Data Networking: A Survey

This document describes a general architecture for flow admission and
termination based on pre-congestion information in order to protect
the quality of service of established inelastic flows within a single
DiffServ domain. Status

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Pre-Congestion Notification (PCN) Architecture

Pre-congestion notification (PCN) provides feedback about load conditions in a network to its boundary nodes. The PCN working group of the IETF discusses the use of PCN to implement admission control (AC) and flow termination (FT) for prioritized realtime traffic in a DiffServ domain. Admission control (AC) is a well-known flow control function that blocks admission requests of new flows when they need to be carried over a link whose admitted PCN rate already exceeds an admissible rate. Flow termination (FT) is a new flow control function that terminates some already admitted flows when they are carried over a link whose admitted PCN rate exceeds a supportable rate. The latter condition can occur in spite of AC, e.g., when traffic is rerouted due to network failures. This survey gives an introduction to PCN and is a primer for this new technology. It presents and discusses the multitude of architectural design options in an early stage of the standardization process in a comprehensive and streamlined way before only a subset of them is standardized by the IETF. It brings PCN from the IETF to the research community and serves as historical record.

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A Survey of PCN-Based Admission Control and Flow Termination

This document describes features of an MPLS path monitoring system and
related use cases. Segment based routing enables a scalable and simple
method to monitor data plane liveliness of the complete set of paths
belonging to a single domain. The MPLS monitoring system adds features
to the traditional MPLS Ping and LSP Trace, in a very complementary
way. MPLS topology awareness reduces management and control plane
involvement of OAM measurements while enabling new OAM features.

A Scalable and Topology-Aware MPLS Data-Plane Monitoring System

The ability for a node to specify a forwarding path, other than the
normal shortest path, that a particular packet will traverse, benefits
a number of network functions. Source-based routing mechanisms have
previously been specified for network protocols, but have not seen
widespread adoption. In this context, the term 'source' means
'the point at which the explicit route is imposed'. This
document outlines various use cases, with their requirements, that
need to be taken into account by the Source Packet Routing in
Networking (SPRING) architecture.

SPRING Problem Statement and Requirements

This document describes a list of functional requirement for OAM in
Segment Routing (SR) based network.

Ruediger Geib

Papers

Pre-Congestion Notification (PCN) Architecture

A Survey of PCN-Based Admission Control and Flow Termination

A Scalable and Topology-Aware MPLS Data-Plane Monitoring System

SPRING Problem Statement and Requirements

OAM Requirements for Segment Routing Network