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Special Interest Group on Sustainable Network Operations

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IEEE Comsoc

We started an IEEE special interest group on Sustainable Network Operations (SNO), chaired by Alex Clemm and Carlos Pignataro.

With respect to sustainability, communication networks can provide opportunities as well as challenges. Invariably, they play a very important role: from resource and energy efficiency optimization opportunities, enablement of applications that reduce the need for physical travel including teleworking and remote operations, to smarter agriculture, more efficient factory floors, and shifting workloads to compute powered with renewable energy.

Many of today’s improvements are driven by general advances in computing hardware as well as in transmission technologies (both fixed and wireless). While it is critical to capitalize on this hardware and transmission driven opportunity, the complexity and interdependence of this problem calls for a holistic approach: it is important to extend questions of “greenness” to other layers in the networking stack, to different planes (data, control, and management), to routing and traffic forwarding, to the ways in which networks are organized and deployed.

Research Questions

The Special Interest Group (SIG) on Sustainable Network Operations (SNO) aims to encourage and facilitate discussion, exchange of ideas, and development of solutions related to question such as:

  • Can data planes be designed in ways that make them more energy-efficient?
  • What protocol advances could enable greener networking solutions?
  • How can networks be optimized not just for QoS or utilization but for minimizing greenhouse gas emissions and maximizing energy and power efficiency?
  • What is the role of a sustainability orchestration system?
  • What novel tools are needed to operate networks more sustainably?
  • How can peak demand be flattened to minimize waste due to overprovisioning?
  • How can operators take advantage of traffic seasonality?
  • How can we even properly account for energy usage and other sustainability parameters to be optimized?
  • In which ways can network programmability, faster control loops, and AI- or intent-based networking help?

SNO aims to provide a cooperative and open forum for researchers, complementing other vendor-focused fora.

Topics

The areas of interests include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Network optimization for sustainability and power consumption
  • Carbon-aware internet protocols
  • Network operations and orchestration for sustainability
  • Network instrumentation for energy consumption
  • Energy-efficient VNF placement and Service Function Chaining
  • Pollution-aware / energy-aware / power source-aware routing
    AI/ML techniques for optimization of energy efficiency
  • Analytical models of network sustainability
  • Decentralized power source management
  • Virtual energy and sustainability in virtualized environments
  • Sleep-mode aware orchestration
  • Protocols for rapid resource commissioning/decommissioning
  • Carbon-based accounting for networking services
  • Solution benchmarking with respect for sustainability
  • Cloud-Edge Continuum from a sustainability viewpoint
  • Sustainable capacity planning to minimize overprovisioning
  • Holistic cost optimization, with energy cost as one factor
  • Computing as an element of end-to-end communications
  • Workload adaptivity in the presence of federated learning workloads

Learn more about the SNO SIG at https://cnom.committees.comsoc.org/sustainable-network-operations-sno/.

Written by dkutscher

December 30th, 2023 at 5:10 pm

Posted in Posts

Collective Communication: Better Network Abstractions for AI

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We have submitted two new Internet Drafts on Collective Communication:

  1. Kehan Yao , Xu Shiping , Yizhou Li , Hongyi Huang , Dirk Kutscher; Collective Communication Optimization: Problem Statement and Use cases; Internet Draft draft-yao-tsvwg-cco-problem-statement-and-usecases-00; work in progress; October 2023

  2. Kehan Yao , Xu Shiping , Yizhou Li , Hongyi Huang , Dirk Kutscher; Collective Communication Optimization: Requirement and Analysis; Internet Draft draft-yao-tsvwg-cco-requirement-and-analysis-00; work in progress; October 2023

Collective Communication refers to communication between a group of processes in distributed computing contexts, for example involving interaction types such as broadcast, reduce, all-reduce. This data-oriented communication model is employed by distributed machine learning and other data processing systems, such as stream processing. Current Internet network and transport protocols (and corresponding transport layer security) make it difficult to support these interactions in the network, e.g., for aggregating data on topologically optimal nodes for performance enhancements. These two drafts discuss use cases, problems, and initial ideas for requirements for future system and protocol design for Collective Communication. They will be discussed at IETF-118.

Written by dkutscher

October 30th, 2023 at 8:03 am

Network Abstractions for Continuous Innovation

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In a joint panel at ACM ICN-2023 and IEEE ICNP-2023 in Reykjavik, Ken Calvert, Jim Kurose, Lixia Zhang, and myself discussed future network abstractions. The panel was moderated by Dave Oran. This was one of the more interesting and interactive panel sessions I participated in, so I am providing a summary here.

Since the Internet's initial rollout ~40 years ago, not only its global connectivity has brought fundamental changes to society and daily life, but its protocol suite and implementations have also gone through many iterations of changes, with SDN, NFV, and programmability among other changes over the last decade. This panel looks into next decade of network research by asking a set of questions regarding where lies the future direction to enable continued innovations.

Opportunities and Challenges for Future Network Innovations

Lixia Zhang: Rethinking Internet Architecture Fundamentals

Lixia Zhang (UCLA), quoting Einstein, said that the formulation of the problem is often more essential than the solution and pointed at the complexities of today's protocols stacks that are apparently needed to achieve desired functionality. For example, Lixia mentioned RFC 9298 on proxying UDP in HTTP, specifically on tunneling UDP to a server acting as a UDP-specific proxy over HTTP. UDP over IP was once conceived as a minial message-oriented communication service that was intended for DNS and interactive real-time communication. Due to its push-based communication model, it can be used with minimal effort for useful but also harmful application, including large-scale DDOS attacks. Proxing UDP over HTTP addresses this and other concerns, by providing a secure channel to a server in a web context, so that the server can authorize tunnel endpoints, and so that the UDP communication is congestion controlled by the underlying transport protocol (TCP or QUIC). This specification can be seen as a work-around: sending unsolicted (and un-authenticated) messages over the Internet is a major problem in today's Internet. There is no general approach for authenticating such messages and no concept for trust in peer identities. Instead of analyzing the root cause of such problems, the Internet communities (and the dominant players in that space) prefer to come up with (highly inefficient) workarounds.

This problem was discussed more generally by Oliver Spatscheck of AT&T Labs in his 2013 article titled Layers of Success, where he discussed the (actually deployed) excessive layering in production networks, for example mobile communication networks, where regular Internet traffic is routinely tunneled over GTP/UDP/IP/MPLS:

The main issue with layering is that layers hide information from each other. We could see this as a benefit, because it reduces the complexities involved in adding more layers, thus reducing the cost of introducing more services. However, hiding information can lead to complex and dynamic layer interactions that hamper the end-to-end system’s reliability and are extremely difficult if not impossible to debug and operate. So, much of the savings achieved when introducing new services is being spent operating them reliably.

According to Lixia, the excessive layering stems from more fundamental problems with today's network architecture, notably the lack of identity and trust in the core Internet protocols and the lack of functionality in the forwarding system – leading to significant problems today as exemplied by recent DDoS attacks. Quoting Einstein again, she said that we cannot solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them, calling for a more fundamental redesign based on information-centric networking principles.

Ken Calvert: Domain-specific Networking

Ken Calvert (University of Kentucky) provided a retrospective of networking research and looked at selected papers published at the first IEEE ICNP conference in 1993. According to Ken, the dominant theme at that time was How to design, build, and analyze protocols, for example as discussed in his 1993 ICNP paper titled Beyond layering: modularity considerations for protocol architectures.

Ken offered a set of challenges and opportunities for future networking research, such as:

  • Domain-specific networking à la Ex uno pluria, a 2018 CCR editorial discussing:
    • infrastructure ossification;
    • lack of service innovation; and
    • a fragmentation into "ManyNets" that could re-create a service-infrastructure innovation cycle.
  • Incentives and "money flow"
    • Can we escape from the advertising-driven Internet app ecosystem? Should we?
  • Wide-area multicast (many-many) service
    • Building block for building distributed applications?
  • Inter-AS trust relationships
    • Ossification of the Inter-AS interface – cannot be solved by a protocol!
  • Impact ⇐ Applications ⇐ Business opportunities ($)
    • What user problem cannot be solved today?
  • "The core challenge of CS ... is a conceptual one, viz., what (abstract) mechanisms we can conceive without getting lost in the complexities of our own making." - Dijkstra

For his vision for networking in 30 years, Ken suggested that:

  • IP addresses will still be in use
    • but visible only at interfaces between different owners' infrastructures
  • Network infrastructure might consist of access ASes + separate core networks operated by the "Big Five".
  • Users might communicate via direct brain interfaces with AI systems.

Dirk Kutscher: Principled Approach to Network Programmability

I offered the perspective of introducing a principled approach to programmability that could provide better programmability (for humans and AI), based on more powerful network abstractions.

Previous work in SDN with protocols such as OpenFlow and dataplane programming languages such as P4 have only scratched the surface of what could be possible. OpenFlow was a great first idea, but it was fundamentally constrained by the IP and Ethernet-based abstractions that were built into it. It can be used for programming some applications in that domain, such as firewalls, virtual networking etc., but the idea of continuous innovation has not really materialized.

Similarly, P4 was advertized as an enabler for new levels of dataplane programmability, but even simple systems such as NetCache have to go to quite some extend to achieve minimal functionality for a proof-of-concept. Another P4 problem that is often reported is the hardware heterogeneity so that universal programmability is not really possible. In my opinion, this raises some questions with respect to applicability of current dataplane programming for in-network computing. A good example of a more productive application of P4 is the recent SIGCOMM paper on NetClone that describes as fast, scalable, and dynamic request cloning for microsecond-Scale RPCs. Here P4 is used as an accelerator for programming relatively simple functionality (protocol parsing, forwarding).

This may not be enough for future universal programmability though. During the panel discussion, I drew an analogy to computer programming language. We are not seeing the first programming language and IDEs that are designed from the ground up for better AI. What would that mean for network programmability? What abstractions and APIs would we need?

In my opinion, we would have to take a step back and think about the intended functionality and the required observability for future (automated) network programmability that is really protocol-independent. This would then entail more work on:

  • the fundamental forwarding service (informed by hardware constraints);
  • the telemetry approach;
  • suitable protocol semantics;
  • APIs for applications and management; and
  • new network emulation & debugging approach (a long the lines of "network digital twin" concepts).

Overall, I am expecting new exiciting research in the direction of principled approaches to network programmability.

Jim Kurose: Open Research Infrastructures and Softwarization

Jim reminded us that the key reason Internet research flourished was the availability of open infrastructure with no incumbent providers initially. The infrastructure was owned by researchers, labs, and universities and allowed for a lot of experimentation.

This open infrastructure has recently been challenged by ossification with the rise of production ISP services at scale, and the emergence of closed ISPs, cellular carriers, hyperscalers operating large portion of the network.

As an example for emerging environments that offer interesting opportunities for experiments and new developments, Jim mentioned 4G/5G private networks, i.e., licensed spectrum created closed ecosystems – but open to researchers, creating opportunities for:

Jim was also suggesting further opportunities in softwarization and programmability, such as (formal) methods for logical correctness and configuration management, as well as programmability to add services beyond the "minimal viable service", such as closed loop automatic control and management.

Finally Jim also mentioned opportunities in emerging new networks such as LEOs, IoT and home networks.

Written by dkutscher

October 23rd, 2023 at 7:46 am

Named Data Microverse

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Our project proposal on Named Data Microverse was selected as a winner of the Future of Data Challenge

The Named Data Microverse project explores how Information-Centric Networking (ICN) can enable a free, open and decentralized approach to “the metaverse”. The project aims to balances scalability and market-based innovation with democratization, trustworthiness, and equitable empowerment of individuals. ICN provides an architectural foundation for secure, distributed applications to be created more easily and provides resilience in natural disasters, better mobility support, cloud-optional local communication, improved privacy, and other benefits that are not addressed solely by “Web3” technologies.

This is a joint project with Jeff Burke and Lixia Zhang at UCLA.

Written by dkutscher

June 17th, 2023 at 6:16 am

Recruiting PostDocs, PhD and MPhil Students for Networked Systems Research

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I am looking for PostDocs, PhD students, and MPhil students for joining my Networked Systems team at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Guangzhou, China.

HKUST is a leading international research university ranked 1st by Times Higher Education Young University Rankings 2020 and 27th by QS World University Rankings 2021. Our new HKUST(GZ) campus in Guangzhou synergizes with and maintains the same academic standard as the original Hong Kong Clear Water Bay campus.

HKUST(GZ) follows a new innovative cross-discplinary approach, where computer science research interacts with hard and natural sciences, system engineering and socio-economic research.

Research Areas

I am pursuing systems research on topics such as:

We are addressing different applications such as:

  • Enabling new networked systems such as next-generation Web, network-supported AR/VR ("Metaverse");
  • Advancing the Internet and the Web to a more secure, privacy-preserving and overall more user-centric infrastructure
  • Secure and scalable edge computing;
  • Infrastructure for data science; and
  • Data-oriented IoT.

Expected Qualifications and Background

  • Ability to build software systems;
  • Knowledge in computer networking and distributed systems; and
  • Ambition to combine excellent research with building systems and artefacts that matter.

If you are interested in joining HKUST(GZ) as postdoc, postgraduate, or MPhil student please feel free to reach out to me. My e-mail address at HKUST: dku@ust.hk

Links


Written by dkutscher

October 18th, 2022 at 3:04 pm

Posted in Jobs,Posts

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Dagstuhl Seminar on Compute-First Networking

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Eve Schooler, Jon Crowcroft, Phil Eardley, and myself organized an online Dagstuhl seminar on Compute-First Networking earlier in June that was attended by an excellent group of researchers from distributed computing, networking and data analytics communities.

Dagstuhl has now published the seminar report that discusses new perspectives on doing Computing in the Networking, use cases and that includes many references to relevant literature and on-going projects in the field.

Executive Summary

Edge- and more generally In-Network Computing are key elements in many traditional content distribution services today, typically connecting cloud-based computing to consumers. The advent of new programmable hardware platforms, research and wide deployment of distributed computing technologies for data processing, as well as new exciting use cases such as distributed Machine Learning and Metaverse-style ubiquitous computing are now inspiring research of more fine-granular and more principled approaches to distributed computing in the "Edge-To-Cloud Continuum".

The Compute-First Networking Dagstuhl seminar has brought together researchers and practitioners in the fields of distributed computing, network programmability, Internet of Things, and data analytics to explore the potential, possible technological components, as well as open research questions in an exciting new field that will likely induce a paradigm shift for networking and its relationship with computing.

Traditional overlay-based in-network computing is typically limited to quite specific purposes, for example CDN-style edge computing. At the same time, network programmability approaches such as Software-Defined Networking and corresponding languages such as P4 are often perceived as too limited for application-level programming. Compute-First Networking (CFN) views networking and computing holistically and aims at leveraging network programmability, server- and serverless in-network computing and modern distributed computing abstraction to develop a new system's approach for an environment where computing is not merely and add-on to existing networks, but where networking is re-imagined with a broader and ubiquitous notion of programmability.

We expect this approach to enable several benefits: it can help to unlock distributed computing from the existing silos of individual cloud and CDN platforms – a necessary condition to enable Keiichi Matsuda's vision of Hyper-Reality and Metaverse concepts where the physical world, human users and different forms of analytics, and visual rendering services constantly engage in information exchanges, directly at the edges of the network. It can also help to provide reliable, scalable, privacy-preserving and universally available platforms for Distributed Machine Learning applications that will play a key role in future large-scale data collection and analytics.

CFN's integrated approach allows for several optimizations, for example a more informed and more adaptive resource optimization that can take into account dynamically changing network conditions, availability of utilization of compute platforms as well as application requirements and adaptation boundaries, thus enabling more
responsive and better-performing applications.

Several interesting research challenges have been identified that should be addressed in order to realize the CFN vision: How should the different levels of programmability in todays system be integrated into a consistent approach? How would programming and communication abstractions look like? How do orchestration systems need to evolve in order to be usable in these potentially large scale scenarios? How can be guarantee security and privacy properties of a distributed computing slice without having to rely on just location attributes? How would the special requirements and properties of relevant applications such as Distributed Machine best be mapped to CFN – or should distributed data processing for federated or split Machine Learning play a more prominent role in designing CFN abstractions?

This seminar was an important first step in identifying the potential and a first set of interesting new research challenges for re-imaging distributed computing through CFN – an exciting new topic for networking and distributed computing research.

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December 1st, 2021 at 4:18 pm

Posted in Events,Posts

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Addressing in the Internet

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There was a side meeting on Internet Addressing at IETF-112 this week, discussing potential gaps in Internet Addressing and potential use cases that would suggest new addressing structures.

Looking at the realities in the Internet today, I do not think that actual relevant use cases and current issues in the Internet are served well by just a new addressing approach for the Internet Protocol. Instead I believe that there needs to be architectural discussion first – and addressing might eventually fall out as a result.

My slides for the panel discussion.

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November 11th, 2021 at 2:22 pm

Posted in IETF,Posts

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Zensur im Internet

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In der neuen Folge unseres Podcasts Neulich im Netz widmen wir uns eines etwas delikateren Themas: Zensur im Internet

Insbesondere geht es um die "Great Firewall of China" (GFW), die wir in Bezug auf ihre technische Umsetzung und Probleme analysiert haben.

Anhand von Publikationen und eigenen Erfahrungen analyisieren wir, wie die GFW grob funtioniert, kontinuiierlich weiterentwickelt wird, und wie effektiv unterschiedliche Werkzeuge wie VPNs, shadowsocks usw. sind.

Diese und weitere Aspekte von Zensur im Internet in der dritten Episode von Neulich im Netz.

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June 23rd, 2021 at 9:56 am

Ist das DNS Noch zu Retten?

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In der neuen Folge unseres Podcasts Neulich im Netz geht um Namen im Internet, d.h., um das Domain Name System (DNS). Wir sprechen über grundlegende DNS-Funktionen, die Bedeutung, die das DNS für das Internet und das Web hat und über Anwendungen wie Tracking und Traffic Steering, die man vielleicht nicht unbedingt mit Namensauflösung in Verbindung bringt.

Wir diskutieren, inwieweit das technische Design des DNS und seine heutige Verwendung zu Sicherheitsproblemen führt und beurteilen einige vorgeschlagene Verbesserungen. Ist das DNS in der heutigen Form noch zu retten? Wie stehen die Chancen dafür? Diese und andere Frage in der zweiten Episode von Neulich im Netz.

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June 9th, 2021 at 11:01 am

Neulich im Netz – the Internet Technologies Podcast

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I am pleased to announce that I have teamed up with Rolf Winter for a new bi-weekly video podcast series: Neulich im Netz.

Neulich im Netz

We are covering current and relevant developments in Internet technologies and networked systems in general. We are starting with the german language channel.

Our first episode has been released today: We are talking about Covid-19 and the Internet.

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May 26th, 2021 at 10:44 am

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