Infrastructure Aware Applications

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Abstract in foreign language

The success of the IP protocol stack and also the success of the Internet as a technology lies in its simplicity. Based on the classical hourglass visualization, a wide variety of first and second layer technologies are all related to the IP and the intelligence is provided by the higher layers in most cases on the edge of the network. In theory, the details of the infrastructure are hidden from the applications and the application programmers. The developer of a given application should focus on the implementation of their own business logic without being concerned about the lower layers. The network devices in the core of the network are simple and stateless, their main task being fast packet forwarding, while logically near the customers the active devices may provide some basic services for the network operator. This paradigm is about 30 years old and since its introduction many things have changed. Almost all the services related to information exchange are now based or will be based on the services provided by the IP network. The widespread use of overlay technologies and virtualization is also an important trend. This heterogeneous demand together with the wide variety of access layer technologies are the main facilitators of the paradigm shift we are now witnessing. The network is becoming evermore intelligent and providing context-based services, while the applications or the underlying layers are becoming increasingly infrastructure aware. The main active device vendors are now opening the black boxes and they starting to provide environments for running third party applications on the active devices [14]. This step will make the intelligent or active network described in [128] possible. Here the goal of the thesis is twofold. First, we would like to show that even the known intelligent services have serious scalability issues. We will show that a new aspect of the number of unicast or multicast flows going through an active device should be considered by network engineers or application developers. Second, we will present four approaches where the application itself takes into the account the capabilities of the underlying network. The novel features presented by this work are: - The scalability issues of the intelligent services - The ability to observe the hiding botnets on the Internet - A small degree, robust DHT - Signaling compression for the adaptation of the SIP protocol - Distributed storage

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