Bringing path diversity to the endhosts using Software Defined Networks and IPv6 Segment Routing

PhD Thesis · 2022

Abstract

Since the eve of the Internet, performance and robustness are the main goal to its evolution. Because everything can fail, network operators avoid keeping a single point of failure when designing their networks. They duplicate links and routers to be able to cope with at least one failure. When a failure occurs, the impact for the users is limited. An alternative is available so that network connectivity is ensured. This good practice has another positive consequence. When nothing fails, a variety of paths exist to reach a given destination over the Internet. As the number of connected devices continues to increase, these additional paths represent an interesting resource to increase performance at a lower cost. Researchers investigated how to load balance traffic through different paths to provide good performance. They tried to improve the control of network operators on their network and run complex optimization algorithm to route the traffic. This is called Traffic Engineering. These techniques harbor good average results but consider aggregates of connections over extended periods of time. Indeed, aggregation is crucial to prevent optimization problems to becoming too complex. Other solutions extended the endhosts protocols to be able to use multiple paths. Each data flow can grade its performance of any path and choose the best paths for its use case. These multipath protocols require support on both ends, and usually have limited access to the path diversity because of the lack of communication between the network and the endhosts. This thesis designs strategies to allow the network and the endhosts to collaborate and use this collaboration to reap path diversity benefits while using single-path protocols. We focus on networks regrouping many endhosts: typically enterprise networks and data centers.

People

Mathieu Jadin

Cite (BibTeX)

@phdthesis{jadin2022bringing,
  title={Bringing path diversity to the endhosts using Software Defined Networks and IPv6 Segment Routing},
  author={Jadin, Mathieu},
  year={2022},
  school={UCLouvain}
}