Politecnico di Torino | Servizi per la didattica

KEYWORD

ALCATEL LUCENT BELL LABS France - Design, implementation and evaluation of Information Centric Networking (ICN) functionalities in high speed network devices

azienda Thesis in external company estero Thesis abroad

keywords CONTENT CACHING, NETWORK PROTOCOL

Reference persons MARCO MELLIA

External reference persons Diego Perino – Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent - diego.perino@alcatel-lucent.com
Roger Boislaigue - Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent – roger.boislaigue@alcatel-lucent.com

Research Groups Alcatel Lucent Bell Labs - France, Telecommunication Networks Group

Thesis type SPERIMENTALE

Description The Internet communication model designed in the 60 and 70s and centered on a host-to-host conversation is currently under debate as it shows its inadequacy in following the radical changes in the network use. Nowadays Internet users are in fact more interested on the content the network can provide them rather than on the location at which the resource is physically stored. Recently, the research community has proposed a novel network paradigm, Information Centric Networking (ICN) (see [1] for a good survey) that builds on the information/content users wish to retrieve, and redesigns the communication primitives around named data. However, the deployment of ICN functionalities requires upgrading today’s routers.
ICN functionalities can be deployed on different elements of a router as line-cards or integrated service modules. Those elements are based on different architectures, ranging from ad-hoc network processors to general purpose processors. The different deployment options have advantages and disadvantages and require ad-hoc designs to achieve the desired speed performance (i.e., 40 Gbps).
The internship will focus on the system design and performance evaluation of a flexible solution able to support ICN functionalities (e.g., [1, 4, 5, 6]) at high-speed on an general purpose Intel-based processor architecture. Specifically the internship will focus on solutions (algorithms, data structures, protocols) for the main building blocks enabling:
1) packet-level storage management based on packet names
2) the maintenance of soft-state information about requested data
3) name-based packet forwarding and routing
4) enhanced processing, monitoring and control functions on flowing data
The internship will build on our previous work [2, 3, 7], and on the on-going work where ICN functionalities are implemented on a network processor architecture. Performance evaluation will be carried out by means of experimental evaluation in a high-speed experimental environment, and the intern will also in charge of comparing the different deployment options.
The intern will potentially collaborate with other Bell Labs locations and research laboratories, either academic (INRIA, Telecom ParisTech, Lip6) and industrial entities (Orange Labs France Telecom R&D), and will probably contribute to scientific papers. The duration of the internship is 6 months and the work carried on during this period could potentially lead to a Ph.D. thesis.