Internet DRAFT - draft-galis-irtf-sarnet21-report
draft-galis-irtf-sarnet21-report
IRTF A. Galis
Internet-Draft University College London
Intended status: Informational D. Lou
Expires: 27 January 2022 Huawei Technologies Duesseldorf GmbH
26 July 2021
Semantic Addressing and Routing for Future Networks (SARNET-21) Workshop
Report
draft-galis-irtf-sarnet21-report-01
Abstract
This document provides an overview of the "Semantic Addressing and
Routing for Future Networks" workshop (SARNET-21), which took place
on June 10, 2021, in Paris, France and online as part of the IEEE
International Conference on High-Performance Switching and Routing.
The main goal of the SARNET-21 workshop was to explore, together with
the research community, the use cases and network requirements in the
domain of semantic addressing and routing, and identify potential
research challenges to be tackled in the future.
Note that this document is a report on the proceedings of the
SARNET-21 workshop compiled by the authors. It captures the views
and positions of the workshop participants as expressed during the
workshop.
Status of This Memo
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provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
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This Internet-Draft will expire on 27 January 2022.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2021 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
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Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. Workshop Agenda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3. Discussions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.1. Technical Presentations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.2. Panel on the Impact on Future Networks of Semantic
Addressing and Routing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
4. Summary, Next Steps and Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
6. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
7. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
8. Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
9. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Appendix A. SARNET-21 Technical Program Committee . . . . . . . 9
Appendix B. Accepted Papers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Appendix C. Workshop Materials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
1. Introduction
Various networks, such as IoT networks, industry networks, data-
center networks, content distribution networks, satellite networks,
etc., have been emerging for the past decade in the light of digital
transformation. These heterogeneous networks often adopt different
architectures, topologies, as well as addressing and routing
mechanisms. The satellite network is a typical example of a highly
dynamic topology in which mobile network nodes can cause stability
issues to existing routing protocols. IoT and manufacturing networks
often adopt alternative addressing semantics that go beyond the
network location defined in IPv4 and/or IPv6.
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In simple terms, semantic addressing is about taking a regular
address and assigning special meaning to some or all of the bits.
Examples include multicast addresses, segment identifiers in segment
routing, and network programming abstractions. Although the specific
semantics help to facilitate addressing and routing within the
network, scalability challenges arise from providing the definition
of those semantics, and the interconnection among such networks and
the Internet.
Several techniques have been proposed that modify/improve the default
IP forwarding behaviors (such as least-cost path) to better meet the
application requirements, based on additional information available
in the packet (both in header and payload) and configurable policies
in routers. Collectively, these mechanisms are sometimes referred to
as "Semantic Routing" [I-D.king-irtf-challenges-in-routing]. The
alternative semantics used to make routing decisions, together with
the IP addresses, could be applied to a network overlay [RFC7665], or
can be directly embedded into the address field, which is the case in
some limited domains [RFC8799] such as LoRaWAN deployments [LoRaWan].
However, those ad-hoc solutions have been developed in a fragmented
way, which creates interoperability issues between limited domains or
between individual routers, and can lead to increased fragility or
even security/privacy leakage. A more holistic approach can design
the architectural patterns based on semantic routing for future
networks.
In June 2021, the "Semantic Addressing and Routing for Future
Networks" (SARNET-21) workshop was held as part of the IEEE
International Conference on High-Performance Switching and Routing.
This event was held in Paris, France and online. The main goal of
the SARNET-21 workshop was to explore the use cases and network
requirements in the domain of semantic addressing and routing, and
identify potential research challenges to be tackled in the future.
The participants and audience of the workshop were drawn chiefly from
the research community.
This document is a report on the proceedings of the SARNET-21
workshop compiled by the authors. It captures the views and
positions of the workshop participants as expressed during the
workshop.
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2. Workshop Agenda
The workshop&s goal was to invite the research community to
collectively explore semantic addressing and routing and identify
potential requirements and networking solutions. Researchers and
experts from industry and academia got the opportunity to share their
experiences and achievements by addressing the challenges mentioned
above.
The workshop also served as a venue to identify problems and to
discover common interests that may turn into new work or into changes
in the direction of ongoing work at the IETF and/or the Internet
Research Task Force (IRTF).
The SARNET-21 workshop received 19 submissions and accepted 10 papers
based on a minimum of three peer reviews. The accepted papers were
presented in 3 technical sessions. The accepted papers are listed in
Appendix B. In addition to the technical sessions, a keynote talk on
"The Routing Challenges for Future Networks" was given by Prof.
Olivier Bonaventure from Universite Catholique de Louvain
(UCLouvain), and a panel discussion on "Semantic Addressing and
Routing Impact on Future Networks" was moderated by Prof. Alex Galis
from University College London (UCL).
3. Discussions
3.1. Technical Presentations
The papers that were presented in the technical sessions cover the
following topics:
Semantic Addressing: Alternative addressing semantics, beyond the
use of traditional network locations in IPv4/IPv6, can overcome
many of the limitations exhibited by existing technologies.
Papers on this topic presented approaches ranging from non-IP
addresses, which are automatically derived according to the
network structure, IP addresses representing a space geo-location,
and anycast addresses used as service identifiers. In the case of
network structure-oriented addresses, significant performance
improvements have been demonstrated compared to IP with OSPF or
BGP. The use of space geo-location addresses provides support for
highly dynamic network topologies (e.g., in low earth orbit (LEO)
satellite constellations). In contrast, anycast addresses have
been shown to determine the best (instead of the closest) service
instance in distributed edge compute scenarios.
Semantic Routing: Papers on this topic presented solutions in which
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routing decisions are based on semantic addresses and other fields
in the packet, going beyond the traditional shortest path first
algorithm. One such paper used an application-layer overlay to
act as the routing substrate to perform traffic differentiation
and fine-grained per-flow traffic management based on tags added
to packets that signify, for example, the desired QoS levels.
Another example concerned the use of service names (simple binary
identifiers of fixed size) to route traffic within a domain, which
improves service access in terms of network and service latency.
Security: Security was one of the capabilities that have been
overlooked in the original design of the Internet. Two papers in
the workshop proposed solutions in this space. The first was
developed in the context of named data networking where
decentralized identifiers are used to build self-verifiable
content advertisements. Based on these, routers can verify that a
content advertisement originates from an authorized entity without
requiring any trusted third party, thus preventing DoS attacks.
The other paper presented an approach that overcomes privacy
violations as a result of using location-oriented IP addresses.
This is based on source routing with public-key cryptography to
establish connections and simple private symmetric encryption in
the data path that allows for fully stateless packet transmission
between two endpoints in the Internet.
Programmability: Network programmability has been an instrumental
topic for a while due to its benefits in terms of flexibility and
adaptability. Papers on this topic focused on using SDN to
configure forwarding rules according to semantic routing policies
(e.g., QoS), changing the forwarding behavior of a programmable
data plane through P4, and using flexible virtualization
technologies for the realization of network functions.
Limited Domains: Various limited domains have been targeted by
papers presented at the workshop. There took their unique
characteristics and requirements into account when designing the
respective solutions. Included among these were satellite and
vehicular networks that have highly dynamic topologies, industrial
networks with strict QoS expectations, and IoT networks that
involve efficient delivery of bulk data and short addresses.
3.2. Panel on the Impact on Future Networks of Semantic Addressing and
Routing
A panel of experts was convened and chaired by Prof. Alex Galis:
* Christian Jacquenet (Orange, France)
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* Rui Aguiar (University of Aveiro, Portugal)
* Adrian Farrel (Old Dog Consulting, UK)
* Mohamed Faten Zhani (ETS, Canada)
The panelists and audience had a fascinating and constructive
discussion for about 2 hours. The panelists, in their presentations,
raised essential points including:
* Significant changes can make network operators nervous. Hence,
there is a need for robust standardization effort to ensure
graceful and safe co-existence with legacy equipment and a clear
migration path.
* The set of questions that research should address.
* Privacy and security are critical requirements for future
addressing/routing solutions.
* Semantics tend to be service-specific.
* Routing protocols should be customized to the needs of the
applications.
During the session, the panelists expressed the opinion that although
semantic routing also exists today to a certain degree (e.g., ECMP,
IP Flex-algo, etc.), any change that will question decades of IP
network operation will undoubtedly make operators nervous. Any new
addressing/routing system and framework will need to coexist with
legacy gear and thus requires a robust standardization effort with
one of the focal points on avoiding semantic leakage between routing
domains/limited domains/slices/partitions on the Internet.
While this is a fundamental topic, the panel recognized that the
potential impacts and benefits of changing the addressing and routing
system have been overlooked. There is, hence, a need to revisit the
origins of the Internet. Given that the Internet architecture is
composed of many limited domains interconnected by a transport layer
and associated protocols, the panelists said that understanding what
is happening with limited domains and why they exist will help us
better understand the impact of semantic addressing and routing. New
protocols could be deployed and evaluated starting from such limited
domains or network slices, where the effect is contained. Due to its
fragility, there was general consensus that care needs to be taken
over any changes in the backbone of the Internet.
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As semantics is mainly service-specific standardized dynamic links
between forwarding plane and services are instrumental. As such
standardized, safe deterministic network programmability and
frameworks enabling semantic addressing and new routing protocols
with guarantees are needed, also enabling cost-efficient solutions of
(In-time and On-time) service-inferred performance management.
Another conclusion of the panel was there is a need to explore new
routing technologies and protocols inside limited domains to deliver
new capabilities and better QoS, enabling application-level
innovation and precluding pollution between domains. There was an
observation that we are already re-using many protocols in limited
domains that are currently used in the Internet, e.g., TCP/IP, BGP,
etc. While this is not a bad practice, it is necessary to clearly
state their "private" nature. For instance, BGP was used for routing
in SIP, but it was given a new protocol ID. The panelists said that
if we design protocol extensions or entirely new protocols, we need
to make them compatible to avoid distorting the Internet routing
system.
In terms of standardization, the panel concluded that researchers
should be encouraged to communicate and exchange their research
results. Doing research in silos doesn't help the adoption of new
technologies and protocols. Fragmenting the problem and farming out
the necessary engineering work to some existing silos standardization
groups doesn't solve such systemic challenges either. While
permissionless innovation is a way to achieve agile development of
new ideas and see them deployed in limited domains, the panel's view
was that mutual review is essential for stable protocols, and
widescale adoption is dependent on standardization. The opinion that
the IRTF is an effective and suitable place to facilitate this kind
of discussion and progress was expressed.
4. Summary, Next Steps and Conclusions
Semantic addressing and routing is an exciting topic attracting a lot
of attention from the research community. New semantics have been
invented and deployed in limited domains for new capabilities, better
QoS, higher flexibility, and efficiency. This enables incremental
deployment of new technologies on "isolated islands" for innovative
solutions that may or may not percolate to the whole Internet at a
later stage. However, it is challenging to securely and seamlessly
connect a limited domain that uses new semantic addressing and
routing capabilities to the Internet. How will the new semantics
will be treated in the Internet? What if different devices have
different semantic routing schemes? Although non-scalable patch
solutions could be used to solve this issue to some extent, this is
more of a research problem rather than an engineering issue. A
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"holistic" approach would be to look for potential architectural
patterns or common building blocks to facilitate the interconnection
between the limited domain and Internet.
To conclude, the area of semantic addressing and routing deserves
further research. The output of this research can be published and
presented at future workshops, but equally important is the
standardization effort that should be invested to ensure stability,
scalability, and interoperability of potential solutions.
Based on the open discussions among the workshop participants and our
overall experience with the workshop, several observations have been
made, which could lead to some actions as follows:
SARNET-22: SARNET-21 was the first time the workshop had been held,
and was a successful event. It has attracted high-quality
technical papers, was very well attended, and featured lively
discussions. The outcomes suggest holding a follow-up workshop
next year.
Research questions: Important research challenges have been
identified by workshop participants, which deserve careful
consideration. A coordinated effort in addressing these
challenges could constitute a meaningful target. The challenges
will continue to be documented in
[I-D.king-irtf-challenges-in-routing], and a discussion venue is
provided by the SARAH email list [Sarah].
IRTF RG: Several participants, including panelists, expressed the
need for coordinated research and a concerted standardization
effort. A research group could facilitate such activities
umbrella of the IRTF that might lead to new work in the IETF.
5. Security Considerations
This document is a workshop report and has no direct impact on
security. Many of the ideas in the papers and presentations
discussed at the workshop could have different security impacts.
Each workshop paper should be read for its own security
considerations. The security consequences of semantic addressing and
routing demand further research.
6. IANA Considerations
This document has no IANA actions.
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7. Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the distinguished keynote speaker,
panelists, paper presenters, workshop participants for the exciting
presentations and discussions, and the Technical Program Committee
members who contributed their time to provide high-quality reviews.
The workshop organizers would also like to thank the HPSR-21
conference organizers for hosting the workshop in excellent
facilities in Paris, France.
8. Contributors
TBD
9. Informative References
[I-D.king-irtf-challenges-in-routing]
King, D. and A. Farrel, "Challenges for the Internet
Routing Infrastructure Introduced by Changes in Address
Semantics", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-king-
irtf-challenges-in-routing-03, 14 June 2021,
<https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-king-irtf-
challenges-in-routing-03.txt>.
[LoRaWan] The LoRa Alliance, "The Long Range WAN Link Layer
Specification", Specification v1.0.4, <https://lora-
alliance.org/resource_hub/lorawan-104-specification-
package/>.
[RFC7665] Halpern, J., Ed. and C. Pignataro, Ed., "Service Function
Chaining (SFC) Architecture", RFC 7665,
DOI 10.17487/RFC7665, October 2015,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7665>.
[RFC8799] Carpenter, B. and B. Liu, "Limited Domains and Internet
Protocols", RFC 8799, DOI 10.17487/RFC8799, July 2020,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8799>.
[Sarah] "Semantic Address Routing and Hardware", Email discussion
list SARAH, <https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/WA-
JISC.exe?SUBED1=SARAH&A=1>.
Appendix A. SARNET-21 Technical Program Committee
* Olivier Bonaventure, UCLouvain, Belgium
* Filip De Turck, Ghent University, Belgium
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* Ning Wang, University of Surrey, UK
* Xiaoming Fu, Gottingen University, Germany
* Tarik Taleb, Aalto University, Finland
* Maziar Nekovee, University of Sussex, UK
* Miguel Rio, University College London, UK
* Dirk Trossen, Huawei Technologies, Germany
* Michael Menth, University Tuebingen, Germany
* Jon Crowcroft, Cambridge University, UK
* Lefteris Mamatas, University of Macedonia, Greece
* Albert Cabellos-Aparicio, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya,
Spain
* Noura Liman, University of Waterloo, Canada
* Stefano Secci, CNAM, France
* Akihiro Nakao, University of Tokyo, Japan
* Mohamed Faten Zhani, ETS, Canada
* Luigi Iannone, Huawei Technologies, France
* Cristel Pelsser, University of Strassbourg, France
* Michele Nogueira, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil
* Leonardo Linguaglossa, Telecom Paris, France
* Lisandro Zambenedetti Granville, Federal University of Rio Grande
do Sul, Brazil
Appendix B. Accepted Papers
The following 10 papers were presented at the workshop (listed in
presentation order):
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* Paolo Bellavista, Mattia Fogli, Luca Foschini, Carlo Giannelli,
Lorenzo Patera, Cesare Stefanelli, "QoS-Enabled Semantic Routing
for Industry 4.0 based on SDN and MOM Integration",
<https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9481869>
* Yizhou Li, Zifa Han, Shuheng Gu, Guanhua Zhuang, Feng Li,
"Dyncast: Use Dynamic Anycast to Facilitate Service Semantics
Embedded in IP address", <https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/
document/9481819>
* Gao Zheng, Ning Wang, Rahim Tafazolli, XinPeng Wei, Jinze Yang,
"Virtual Data-Plane Addressing for SDN-based Space and Terrestrial
Network Integration", <https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/
document/9481837>
* Ryota Kawashima, "A Vision to Software-Centric Cloud Native
Network Functions: Achievements and Challenges",
<https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9481848>
* Rene Glebke, Dirk Trossen, Ike Kunze, Zhe Lou, Jan Rueth, Mirko
Stoffers and Klaus Wehrle, "Service-based Forwarding via
Programmable Dataplanes", <https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/
document/9481814>
* Paul Almasan, Jose Suarez-Varela, Bo Wu and Shihan Xiao, Pere
Barlet-Ros and Albert Cabellos-Aparicio, "Towards Real-Time
Routing Optimization with Deep Reinforcement Learning: Open
Challenges", <https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9481864>
* Mays AL-Naday, Irene Macaluso, "Flexible Semantic-based Data
Networking for IoT Domains", <https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/
document/9481800>
* Nikos Fotiou, Yannis Thomas, Vasilios A. Siris, George Xylomenos
and George C. Polyzos, "Securing Named Data Networking routing
using Decentralized Identifiers", <https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/
document/9481850>
* Francesco Tusa, David Griffin, Miguel Rio, "Private Routing in the
Internet", <https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9481808>
* Nirmala Shenoy, Shreyas Chandraiah, Peter Willis, "A Structured
Approach to Routing in the Internet",
<https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9481818>
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Appendix C. Workshop Materials
The keynote and panel slides can be found in the following link,
<https://github.com/danielkinguk/sarah/tree/main/conferences/sarnet-
21>
Authors' Addresses
Alex Galis
University College London
United Kingdom
Email: a.galis@ucl.ac.uk
David Lou
Huawei Technologies Duesseldorf GmbH
Germany
Email: zhe.lou@huawei.com
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