Enriching the internet control-plane for improved traffic engineering. (Amélioration du plan de contrôle d'internet avec de nouvelles solutions d'ingénierie de trafic)

One of the major challenges in the evolution of the Internet architecture is the definition of a protocol architecture that allows to solve the following major issues in Internet routing and traffic forwarding capabilities, (i) keeping a routing state that is manageable with current and forthcoming computing infrastructure – i.e., with few millions of states, (ii) offering a scalable pull architecture in support of data-plane programmability, (iii) offering a scalable forwarding plane able to be regularly optimized with only active flows information, (iv) offering locator/identifier separation for advanced IP mobility, (v) is incrementally deployable, (vi) can enhance the support of over-the-top services. The Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) has been identified as one of the rising protocols in this respect. In its current status, it supports the above mentioned requirements at a level that is acceptable for basic networking environments. However, it shows too limited capacities when it comes to take into consideration fault resiliency and capability to react fast to network state updates. These shortcomings can be compensated by enhancing the control-plane architecture, and the routing algorithms therein. In this dissertation, we propose new protocol features and experiment novel control-plane primitives, as well as hybrid distributed-centralized routing state dissemination algorithms, to scale with different network conditions. We first design and build own open source LISP data-plane and control plane node, comparing it with other implementations, showing how our implementation can scale for large networks and reach performances suitable for real deployments. We present how our implementation served to operate all network nodes (data-plane and control-plane nodes) of a large scale experimentation testbed, the LISP-Lab testbed. Then we propose a novel LISP-based solution for VM live migrations across geographically separated datacenters over wide area IP networks. Experimenting it at large scale, we show that with our approach we can easily reach sub-second downtimes upon Internet-wide migration, even for very distant clients. Moreover, we investigate cross-layer network optimization protocols, in particular in relation with the Multipath Transport Control Protocol (MPTCP) to which LISP can deliver path diversity in support of bandwidth increase, confidentiality support and connection reliability, also using LISP traffic engineering network overlays. Despite we could benefit from only few overlay network nodes, we could experimentally evaluate our proposals showing the positive impact by using our solution, the negative impact of long round-trip times on some MPTCP subflows, and the strong correlation between the differential round-trip time among subflows and the throughput performance. Finally, we worked on a framework to improve LISP operation at the Internet scale, by facilitating cooperation between LISP Mapping Systems and introducing more automation in the LISP connectivity service delivery procedure. We believe such optimization could raise awareness among the service providers’ community, yielding new business opportunities related to LISP mapping services and the enforcement of advanced inter-domain traffic engineering policies for the sake of better quality of service guarantees.