Netos
-
SCTP and BGP
The Border Gateway Protocol, BGP, is the routing glue that holds the
Internet together.
It provides reachability information across all Internet Service
providers, subject to complex policy constraints, so that end systems
(host computers like the one you are reading this dcument on) can
communicate each other. Packets flow using the Internet Datagram
Protocol, which simply offers a best effort delivery from A to B.
Routers between A and B look at the destination address in the header
control information in datagrams (a.k.a. packets) to figure out where
they go next, based on forwarding tables that they build, based on the
information they learn from BGP.
The Transmission Control Protocol, TCP
is the end-to-end protocol that is used by pretty much all
applications (e.g. web brosers talking to web servers, or
skype users talking to each other) to provide reliability,
flow control and congestion control, on top of the
Internet Datagram Protocol.
Only the end systems look at the TCP header control information. They
use it to figure out what function a packet has (data,
acknowledgement) and where it fits in a sequence of packets (or if it
doesnt), and whether to speed up or slow down to allow the other end
breathing space!
Border routers use TCP to connect to each other, because
the routing messages that they exchange with each other, to allow them
to compute the reachability information, to allow them to build the
forwarding tables, to allow them to forward the users' data packets
(TCP/IP), to let everything work, have to be delivered in order,
reliably, and with flow control.
Recently, a new transport protocol, SCTP has been devised, which
allows for a few new end-to-end functions to be offered as well as the
ones TCP providers; these include: multi-homing; connection migration;
multiplexing of data objects between different threads over a single
transport session; and others.
Recently, people have noticed that BGP is rather complex. Part of this
compelxity is that (border) routers need to know whether their
neighbours are working ok, and if not, take action. This may be
implicit in the silence of a neighbour
(shades of Assault on Precinct 13)
Some people would like to re-engineer BGP to be more modular, so that
there are way s to replace components of BGP cleanly - one thing to do
would be for BGP neighbours to exchange messages using SCTP instead of
TCP, as this might be more tractable.
This project, should you choose to accept it Jim, is to
i) analyse the BGP specifications and see how embroiled the use of TCP
is in them. Extract the relevant pieces and see if the system can be
respecified using SCTP instead.
ii) Take a BGP public domain implementation and a public domain SCTP
implementation, and design, build and test a system of BGP routers,
under test load, to see if the system operates correctly. and of
course, see how the performance changes (if at all).
iii) report on all the above, to see if the design and implemention
are any cleaner
Contact: TImothy
Griffin
and
Contact: Jon Crowcroft
-
GIST Overlay Networking Extension (GONE)
Design: Using GIST on SCTP
with HIP addresses, and k-ary neighbour
we build an overlay architecture of SCTP
use GIST and SCTP features to achieve
i) multihoming
ii) fault detection and recovery
iii) HIP style addressing
Evaluation should be of
a) how well does SCTP/GIST work for this (e.g. compared to a pure TCP
overlay or MIT's RON)?
b) how well do the recovery schemes work
c) maybe, how resilient is the architecture (given security designs in
SCTP and GIST) to things like DDoS attacks...
One question that is open, at least, is what is the expected
workload/use to measure this under?
Contact: Jon Crowcroft
-
A world of MIRRORS
Mobile ad hoc networking have been an active research are for a decade, and the evaluations of many protocol proposals rely on simulations. These in turn depend on suitable models, especially of radio frequency propagation and mobility. Unfortunately, the simulation models to date are unsatisfactory, largely due to their lack of realism. This project aims to develop a tool to generate traces based on the modelling framework MIRRORS. The components and formulations of the models are sketched in the paper, so the project has more focus on implementation. Issues to consider include: i) How to implement the models in an extensible way? ii) How to manage the parameter values - passing them on the command line is not practical due to the number of parameters involved! iii) What to output?
Depending on your interests, you could add various 'fun' parts, e.g., a visualiser showing the results, a GUI to allow the user to specify parameter values, or, more useful, trace generators to produce trace files compatible to commonly used simulators. You could identify many steps in this project, each of which can be seen as the completion mark, but producing a truely useful tool is non-trivial. If done right, it will certainly be a well-appreciated contribution to the research community.
Contact: Wenjun Hu
-
Car alarm alternative
There have been many recent initiatives involving networking with vehicles, either between vehicle or inside a vehicle. This project considers an alternative to car alarms. Observe that a car alarm often accidentally goes off, irritating the people around it rather than reminding the owner. The idea is to let an intelligent car text the owner's mobile (it should be a reasonable assumption that the owner will have one) under such a circumstance, and let the owner reset the 'alarm' remotely using the mobile. An actually system would probably involve some circuitry, but we can start with the software side.
Contact: Wenjun Hu
-
Language Models, Scriptability & Abstractions for Network Traffic
Processing
Almost all applications that process network traffic, both on- and
offline, overlap in large parts of functionality: state keeping, packet
iteration, filtering, input abstraction, etc. The Netdude framework
provides a pluggable architecture that allows authors to leverage
efforts made by others to help build new processors with less time, more
modularity, and (hopefully) better quality. One aspect the framework
currently does not provide is scriptability -- writing C code is still
required. This project will involve
- investigating the applicability of the Usenix command line paradigm (piping & filtering output from one command into another, etc) to the problem -- the issue here is that some processing requires repeated scans of input (say, to strip incomplete TCP flows from a trace) and jumps in general
- where necessary, a requirements analysis for features a purpose-specific scripting language (such as used in Bro or Click) should provide
- extend the plugin architecture to purely scripted, single-file plugins (think Emacs or Gimp) that can be accessed from both C and the scripting level, and provide a scripting interface to libnetdude via SWIG.
For more information, see Netdude and the corresponding paper.
Contact: Christian Kreibich
-
Full-state VM Snapshots
Our work on Xen currently has several components which support the
snapshot of a running VM. This project would involve combining and
synchronising the snapshot of a VM's memory, disks, and other relevant
state. Ideally, a final demo would involve a tree-like graphical view
of screen-shots of a VM through history, and allow old versions of the
VM to be restarted (branching the tree) by clicking on them.
Extra work on this project could involve exploring the more
challenging issue of concurrently snapshotting a distributed system
(i.e. many VMs)
running on a set of hosts.
Contact: andrew.warfield@cl.cam.ac.uk
-
The Flying Mouse
This project explores a new interface for the PC build out of cheap,
common components. Take a pen, attach some coloured LEDs to the end
and wire them up to some buttons. Using a webcam, allow the pen to be
used as a mouse, by waving it in the air in front of the screen. As
LEDs are bright and different colours, image tracking should be
relatively straight forward. The implementation should be completely
integrated into an OS (preferably Linux or Windows), and so involves
a decent range of fun hacking.
Students making reasonable progress might consider (a) the addition of
a second camera to implement a 3D interface, or (b) integration of
some gesture recognition for common tasks.
Contact: andrew.warfield@cl.cam.ac.uk
Sort of semi-locally suggested
Initial Point of Contact for these is: Jon Crowcroft
Project Title: TCP improvements for heterogeneous roaming
Mobility impacts every layer of the OSI model. Many efforts have been made
towards reducing handover latencies when roaming between two access points
belonging to the same technology. Recent results show that it is possible to
seamlessly roam between two IEEE 802.11b and keep handoff latencies below
100ms, enabling support for real-time applications on-the-move. However,
when roaming is between different access technologies latency values
increase considerable, depending on the link-layer characteristics of both
radio access technologies. Experimental results, based on Mobile IP, show
that vertical handover latency values can be expected to be close to 2.5
RTTs of the technology used for the registration process. To obtain these
values we need to use the correct set of optimisations in the network layer.
This value of 2.5 RTTs is close to the best that we can do at this layer,
without affecting the network side and this is not enough to support
real-time services.
Additionally to this value, when the mobile devices deal with TCP
connections (i.e. browsing and P2P traffic) there is a significant delay
that needs to be considered: the adaptation time. We define adaptation time
to be from the point at which the mobile node receives the first packet on
the new interface, from the correspondent node, to the point where the new
interface's throughput first reaches the value of the average throughput it
achieves over the lifetime of the connection. Project: This project will
measure, characterise the adaptation time, and propose and implement methods
to reduce its impact on the transport layer. The aim is to reduce the
overall latency. So far efforts in the IETF have been focused to solve
network-layer mobility, but if we want to support seamless mobility we also
need to tackle related issues in upper layers such as the transport layer.
The main work will be done in traffic analysis and kernel modifications to
the TCP/IP stack to implement the proposed methods to reduce the adaptation
time.
Related publication:
David N. Cottingham, Pablo A. Vidales, Is Latency the Real Enemy in Next
Generation Networks?. First International Workshop on Convergence of
Heterogeneous Wireless Networks, July 2005
Further info for
this work and contact for
Suggested by
Dr. Pablo Vidales, now at DT Labs in Berlin.
MCP:- Multicast Copy Program
It is often the case you want to copy the same file to multiple other
machines. THere are a varieity of techniques. One is based on using IP
multicast where available. To this end you also need a reliable
multicast delivery layer - thats what MCP does.
MCP uses TCP-XM, an extension of TCP to send data to multiple
receivers either with multicast or with unicast if multicast is not
availble to some of the receivers. The protocol is well specified and
a user space implementation exists. This projecyt could do one of two
things. First, a kernel version would be nice. Second, deploying it on
the physics grid to real users would be interesting. Evaluation would
be about performance (either speed, or number of receivers or both).
There's quite a lot of implemenation to be done, and then quite a lot
of experiments with a range of workloads and underlying network
conditions.
Contact: Jon Crowcroft
External
This year, a net games company in Cambridge has
suggested some projects.
Initial Point of Contact for these is: Jon Crowcroft
-
Augmented-Reality on Symbian Camera Phones
With increasing mobile phone processing power and camera capabilities fast
becoming standard, the technology has now reached a level where augmented
reality-based applications have become a real possibility.
Gameware already possess the required 3D rendering and camera image
acquisition technology that can be made available to the student for the
project.
Project:
The project will investigate the technical constraints involved in
implementing augmented-reality technology on today's high-end Symbian-based
camera phones. This will involve porting aspects of the open source
ARToolKit to Nokia Series 60 camera phones. Part of the project will also
require the research and develop of efficient and robust image processing
and pattern recognition algorithms suitable for the platform.
-
Evolving Hand-engineered 3D Virtual Creatures
Background:
Genetic representations for evolvable articulated virtual creatures are
often at odds with the requirements of an underlying representation that
supports arbitrary hand-designed virtual creatures. For example, evolvable
3D virtual creatures are often represented using recursive or generative
genomes; hand-engineered creatures can be simply represented using genomes
with a similar structure to the creature morphology.
Project:
This project will look into how these two requirements could be brought
closer together, looking at a number of alternative approaches, such as
developing a hybrid genetic representation, or designing a building process
that enables relatively free-form building of articulated creatures based
on a evolvable genetic representation, or designing suitable pattern-
matching cross-over and mutation operations that can operate on a hand-
built genomes.
-
Evaluation of AGEIA PhysX for the simulation of 3D Articulated Systems
Background:
Physics simulation provides the backbone for realistic virtual creature
simulation and believable mixed-reality systems.
the AGEIA physX engine (formally Novodex) is a cross-platform (PC, PS3 and
Xbox 360) middleware physics simulation SDK that promises significant
performance benefits over rival engines through the use of parallel-
processing and hardware acceleration.
Project:
This project will examine the engine's performance and robustness under
various conditions. In particular, the simulation of arbitrary-connected
articulated powered systems, with the aim to understand the engine's
suitability for simulating evolvable 3D virtual creatures. Development will
be on a Windows PC.
-
Evolution and Islands
Background:
Large-scale virtual world simulations can be simulated over a network of
distributed servers, each modelling a patch of terrain or a separate
island. Servers (such as home PCs or mobile phones) have restricted
resources and bandwidth and, in the case of mobile-based servers, the
geographical proximity of servers to each other is always changing (a
characteristic that could potentially be put to good use). These factors
affect the way agents within the environment interact with each other.
Project:
This project will examine the issues involved in simulating distributed
virtual world simulations, investigating the factors such as managing
population sizes, suitable migration policies between servers, agent and
server loses and latency, changing landscape topologies, etc.
-
Real-time TV Audience Interaction through Mobile Phones
Background:
Live interactive TV is becoming more commonplace through the use of mobile
phones, which are ideally suited for spontaneous and instantaneous
communication. For example, the use of SMS for voting or sending messages
into live TV shows is becoming quite popular. 3G technologies offer
benefits such as continuous interaction and individual feedback.
Project:
This project will research and develop a prototype to demonstrate the
principles behind a system enabling mass audiences to interact live with a
central server via their mobile phones (e.g. over GPRS). The work will look
at the technical requirements of such a system and the constraints that
will be imposed on it, such as latency, bandwidth requirements and client-
side software requirements.
|