MobilityFirst

The MobilityFirst project is founded on the premise that the Internet is approaching an historic inflection point, with mobile platforms and applications poised to replace the fixed-host/server model that has dominated the Internet since its inception. This predictable, yet fundamental, shift presents a unique opportunity to design a next generation Internet in which mobile devices, and applications, and the consequent changes in service, trustworthiness, and management are primary drivers of a new architecture. The goal of MobilityFirst is to better accommodate mobile entities on the Internet in a scalable, trustworthy, and useable manner. Inherently a clean-slate project, MobilityFirst takes a radical approach to redesigning the Internet including rethinking end-point naming, such as through IP, and connection-oriented protocols, such as TCP. At a high level, MobilityFirst allows applications to securely interact with abstract, mobile entities in a connectionless fashion, providing connectivity and minimal user-disruption in the presence of mobility.

NOVN: A named-object based virtual network architecture to support advanced mobile edge computing services

Abstract. Achieving advanced Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) services such as dynamic resource assignment and slicing, maintaining Quality of Service (QoS), and enabling heterogeneous virtual functions are some of the technical challenges associated with edge-cloud enhanced 5G architectures now under consideration. This paper proposes a named-object based virtual network (NOVN) architecture to support low-latency applications in the MEC. Software router implementation running on the ORBIT testbed validates the named-object approach, showing low VN processing and control overhead, and making it possible to achieve low latency. A latency performance improvement of 30% is achieved as compared to the baseline implementation without NOVN. The results also validate feasibility of using the advanced MEC services for an example latency constrained edge cloud scenario.

Resources

The research paper was accepted to Elsevier Pervasive and Mobile Computing.

Tutorials and source code can be accessed from the orbit website: https://www.orbit-lab.org

Citation bibtex

@article{bronzino2020novn,
  title={NOVN: A named-object based virtual network architecture to support advanced mobile edge computing services},
  author={Bronzino, Francesco and Maheshwari, Sumit and Seskar, Ivan and Raychaudhuri, Dipankar},
  journal={Pervasive and Mobile Computing},
  volume={69},
  pages={101261},
  year={2020}
}

MFTP: A Clean-Slate Transport Protocol for the Information Centric MobilityFirst Network

Abstract. This paper presents the design and evaluation of clean-slate transport layer protocols for the MobilityFirst (MF) future Internet architecture based on the concept of named objects. The MF architecture is a specific realization of the emerging class of Information Centric Networks (ICN) that are designed to support new modes of communication based on names of information objects rather than their network addresses or locators. ICN architectures including MF are characterized by the following distinctive features: (a) use of names to identify sources and sinks of information; (b) stor- age of information at routers within the network in order to support content caching and disconnection; (c) multicasting and anycasting as integral network services; and in the MF case (d) hop-by-hop reliability protocols between routers in the network. These properties have significant implications for transport layer protocol design since the current Internet transports (TCP and UDP) were designed for the end-to-end Internet principle which uses address based rout- ing with minimal functionality (i.e. no storage or reliability mechanisms) within the network. Several use cases including web access, large file transfer, Machine-to-machine and multicast services are considered, leading to an identification of four basic functions needed to constitute a flexible transport protocol for ICN: (i) fragmentation and end-to- end re-sequencing; (ii) lightweight end-to-end error recovery with in-network transport proxies; (iii) optional flow and congestion control mechanisms; and (iv) scalable multicast delivery mechanisms. The design of the MobilityFirst trans- port protocol (MFTP) framework realizing these features in a modular and flexible manner is presented and discussed. The proposed MFTP protocol is then experimentally evaluated and compared with TCP/IP for a few representative scenarios including mobile data delivery, web content retrieval and disconnected/late binding service. The results show that significant performance gains can be achieved in each case.

Resources

The research paper was accepted to ACM ICN 2015.

Tutorials and source code can be accessed from the orbit website: https://www.orbit-lab.org

Citation bibtex

@inproceedings{su2015mftp,
  title={Mftp: A clean-slate transport protocol for the information centric mobilityfirst network},
  author={Su, Kai and Bronzino, Francesco and Ramakrishnan, KK and Raychaudhuri, Dipankar},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking},
  pages={127--136},
  year={2015}
}

Achieving Scalable Push Multicast Services Using Global Name Resolution

Abstract. This paper presents a novel approach to achieving scalable push multicast services using the distributed global name resolution service associated with emerging name-based network architectures. The proposed named-object multicast (NOMA) scheme employs unique names to identify multicast groups, while using the global name resolution service (GNRS) to store the tree structure and maintain current mappings to mobile end-user addresses. The NOMA scheme achieves improved scalability and performance over conventional multicast protocols such as PIM-SM and MDSP by taking advantage of the GNRS to simplify tree management and limit control overhead. Performance evaluation results including comparisons with IP multicast are given using a combination of analysis and NS-3 simulation. The results show good scalability properties along with low control overhead for medium to large multicast groups. In addition, NOMA seamlessly handles mobility for end-hosts subscribed to a group, avoiding data losses upon mobility events. Results further demonstrate how separating names from addresses enables NOMA to dynamically forward traffic to mobile users. In conclusion, we describe a proof-of-concept prototype developed for further experimental validation of the proposed NOMA multicast routing scheme.

Resources

The research paper was accepted to IEEE Globecom 2016.

Tutorials and source code can be accessed from the orbit website: https://www.orbit-lab.org

Citation bibtex

@inproceedings{mukherjee2016achieving,
  title={Achieving scalable push multicast services using global name resolution},
  author={Mukherjee, Shreyasee and Bronzino, Francesco and Srinivasan, Suja and Chen, Jiachen and Raychaudhuri, Dipankar},
  booktitle={2016 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM)},
  pages={1--6},
  year={2016},
  organization={IEEE}
}