Award Abstract # 1040043
FIA: Collaborative Research: MobilityFirst: A Robust and Trustworthy Mobility-Centric Architecture for the Future Internet

NSF Org: CNS
Division Of Computer and Network Systems
Recipient: DUKE UNIVERSITY
Initial Amendment Date: August 26, 2010
Latest Amendment Date: January 15, 2013
Award Number: 1040043
Award Instrument: Standard Grant
Program Manager: Darleen Fisher
CNS
 Division Of Computer and Network Systems
CSE
 Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering
Start Date: September 1, 2010
End Date: August 31, 2014 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount: $600,000.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date: $600,000.00
Funds Obligated to Date: FY 2010 = $600,000.00
History of Investigator:
  • Xiaowei Yang (Principal Investigator)
    xwy@cs.duke.edu
  • Romit Roy Choudhury (Co-Principal Investigator)
Recipient Sponsored Research Office: Duke University
2200 W MAIN ST
DURHAM
NC  US  27705-4640
(919)684-3030
Sponsor Congressional District: 04
Primary Place of Performance: Duke University
2200 W MAIN ST
DURHAM
NC  US  27705-4640
Primary Place of Performance
Congressional District:
04
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): TP7EK8DZV6N5
Parent UEI:
NSF Program(s): Special Projects - CNS
Primary Program Source: 01001011DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
Program Reference Code(s): 7363
Program Element Code(s): 171400
Award Agency Code: 4900
Fund Agency Code: 4900
Assistance Listing Number(s): 47.070

ABSTRACT

This project is aimed at the design and experimental validation of a comprehensive clean-slate future Internet architecture. The proposed MobilityFirst architecture is motivated by the ongoing paradigm shift of Internet usage from today?s fixed PC/host (client)?server model to emerging mobile data services and pervasive computing applications. The major design goals of the architecture are: mobility as the norm with dynamic host and network mobility at scale; robustness with respect to intrinsic properties of the wireless medium; trustworthiness in the form of enhanced security and privacy; usability features such as support for context-aware services, evolvability, manageability and economic viability. The key components of the MobilityFirst network design are: (1) separation of naming and addressing, implemented via a fast global dynamic name resolution service; (2) self-certifying public key network addresses to support strong authentication and security; (3) generalized delay-tolerant routing with in-network storage for packets in transit; (4) flat-label internetwork routing with public key addresses; (5) hop-by-hop transport protocols operating over segments rather than an end-to-end path; (6) a separate network management plane that provides enhanced visibility; (7) optional privacy features for user and location data; and (8) an integrated computing and storage layer to support programmability. The project?s scope includes architectural design, validation of key protocol components, testbed prototyping of the MobilityFirst architecture as a whole, and real-world protocol deployment on the GENI experimental infrastructure. The results of this project will provide architectural guidance for cellular-Internet convergence, and are expected to influence future technical standards in the networking industry.

PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

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Ang Li and Xin Liu and Xiaowei Yang "Bootstrapping Accountability in the Internet We Have" ACM/USENIX NSDI , 2011
Xin Liu and Xiaowei Yang and Yong Xia "NetFence:Preventing Internet Denial of Service from Inside Out" ACM SIGCOMM , 2010
Yang Chen , Bingyang Liu , Yu Chen , Ang Li , Xiaowei Yang, Jun Bi "PacketCloud: an Open Platform for Elastic In-network Services" 8th ACM Workshop on Mobility in the Evolving Internet Architec-ture (MobiArch?13) , 2013

PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT

Disclaimer

This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.

Our main outcome in this project is the design, implementation, and integrationof the compute layer in the MobilityFirst architecture.
We designed the compute layer to distributed ``cloudlet'' computeclusters co-located with an ISP's PoPs (Point of Presence). Each ISPuses a conceptually centralized control to control all computeresources in its network. An ISP offers various network functions toend customers or application-level service providers using its computelayer. Sample services include, but not limited to: content caching,unwanted traffic filtering, anonymous communication, load balancing,and traffic optimization.

We implemented the computer layer and integrated it into the overallMobilityFirst architecture. We evaluated the performance of ourimplementation both in a testbed environment and on the Internet. Ourresults show that the computer layer shortens the latency of severalnetwork applications such as rate adaptive video delivery.
Specially, our work includes the following:

- We published the preliminary design of the compute layer (which  we call PacketCloud) in the in the MobiArch'13 workshop. We are  currently submitting the design, implementation, and evaluation of  the compute layer to a journal.

- We worked together with the Rutgers team, and integrated our  PacketCloud part into the mainstream MobilityFirst code base.

- With the compute layer, we are able to add various in-network  services to the MobilityFirst-based network environments. As a  demonstrative example, we have built a rate-adaptive video delivery  system the GENI testbed, and demonstrated the implementation at the  20th GENI Engineering Conference (GEC-20).

- We conducted a measurement-based study using the PlanetLab and  the Amazon EC2 datacenters. Our study shows that using the compute  layer to provide in-network services has significantly lower latency  than using public datacenters.

- We implemented a number of PacketCloud use cases, including  content cache, a firewall, anonymous communication modules, a VPN  gateway, a load balancer, and a traffic optimizer.

- We conducted a detailed evaluation for the per-hop latency and  scalability of the compute layer. Our study shows that PacketCloud  can handle high throughput data traffic, and adds a negligible  per-hop latency.

- We deployed PacketCloud on the real Internet using the PlanetLab  testbed. We used a global content delivery example to demonstrate  the benefit of the compute layer.


Last Modified: 02/24/2015
Modified by: Xiaowei Yang

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