ITC/USA 2014 Conference Proceedings / The Fiftieth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 20-23, 2014 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, CA / Network loads close to Ethernet wire speed and latency sensitive data in a Flight Test Instrumentation (FTI) system, represent challenging requirements for FTI network equipment. Loss of data due to network congestion, overflow on the end nodes, as well as packet latency above a few hundred microseconds, can be critical during a flight test. To avoid these problems, several advanced packet filtering and network optimization functions are required in order to achieve best possible performance and thus avoid loss of data. This paper gives insight into how to properly engineer an Ethernet based FTI network and how to use advanced Ethernet switch techniques such as Quality of Service (QoS) and rate shaping.

Quality of Service is major factor for a successful business in modern and future network services. A minimum level of services is assured indulging quality of Experience for modern real time communication introducing user satisfaction with perceived service quality. Traffic engineering can be applied to provide better services to maintain or enhance user satisfaction through reactive and preventive traffic control mechanisms. Preventive traffic control can be more effective to manage the network resources through admission control, scheduling, policing and traffic shaping mechanisms maintaining a minimum level before it get worse and affect user perception. Accuracy, dynamicity, uniformity and reproducibility are objectives of vast research in network traffic. Real time tests, simulation and network emulation are applied to test uniformity, accuracy, reproducibility and dynamicity. Network Emulation is performed over experimental network to test real time application, protocol and traffic parameters. DummyNet is a network emulator and traffic shaper which allows nondeterministic placement of packet losses, delays and bandwidth changes. KauNet shaper is a network emulator which creates traffic patterns and applies these patterns for exact deterministic placement of bit-errors, packet losses, delay changes and bandwidth changes. An evaluation of KauNet with different patterns for packet losses, delay changes and bandwidth changes on emulated environment is part of this work. The main motivation for this work is to check the possibility to delay and drop the packets of a transfer/session in the same way as it has happened before (during the observation period). This goal is achieved to some extent using KauNet but some issues with pattern repetitions are still needed to be solved to get better results. The idea of history and trace-based traffic shaping using KauNet is given to make this possibility a reality.

Internet of Things (IoT) devices have been widely adopted in many different applications in recent years, such as smart home applications. An adversary can capture the network traffic of IoT devices and analyze it to reveal user activities even if the traffic is encrypted. Therefore, traffic privacy is a major concern, especially in smart home applications. Traffic shaping can be used to obfuscate the traffic so that no meaningful predictions can be drawn through traffic analysis. Current traffic shaping methods have many tunable variables that are difficult to optimize to balance bandwidth overheads and latencies. In this thesis, we study current traffic shaping algorithms in terms of computational requirements, bandwidth overhead, latency, and privacy protection based on captured traffic data from a mimic smart home network. A new traffic shaping method - Dynamic Traffic Padding is proposed to balance bandwidth overheads and delays according to the type of devices and desired privacy. We use previous device traffic to adjust the padding rate to reduce the bandwidth overhead. Based on the mimic smart home application data, we verify our proposed method can preserve privacy while minimizing bandwidth overheads and latencies.

Long Term Evolution (LTE) was designed to provide fast data rates to replace 3G service for mobile devices. As LTE networks and the user base for those networks grow, it becomes necessary for the resources used for those networks to be used as efficiently as possible. This thesis presents an implementation which utilizes an algorithm extended upon the Frank Kelly algorithm to determine resource allocation for UEs and shapes traffic for each UE to meet those allocation limits. The implementation's network represents what an LTE network would do to manage data rates for a UE through a distributed algorithm for rate allocation. The main focus of the implementation is on the UE, where traffic shaping limits application rates by an elastic or inelastic classification through the use of Hierarchical Token Bucket (HTB) queuing disciplines. / Master of Science

Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) is an emerging technology that has the potential to satisfy the increasing demand for reliable and efficient Wide Area Networks (WANs) in the enterprise-network market. This thesis focuses on the main features of an SD-WAN network and on the technical challenges facing the design and implementation of an SD-WAN infrastructure. It also provides a detailed comparison between the SD-WAN and the otherWANs solutions such as MultiProtocol Label Switching (MPLS). The thesis is based on the project that is about the migration of network infrastructure that uses the MPLS technology to a network infrastructure that uses the SD-WAN technology. The migration process includes many phases such as the analysis of the existing MPLS based infrastructure, identification of suitable appliances based on customer requests, and the design of the SD-WAN infrastructure that can be implemented without disrupting the network functioning during the transition stage. The thesis provides a detailed description of these steps and it discusses the trade-offs that were made during the design phase of the project. The results presented in the thesis are obtained through on-site tests performed for the new SD-WAN infrastructure. The tests were performed with the objective to evaluate some of the main SD-WAN functionalities such as load balancing, traffic shaping, and high availability. The obtained results show the effective functioning of the network infrastructure and illustrate some of the main advantages that the new SD-WAN infrastructure has over the old MPLS infrastructure. Finally, this thesis could be of interest to network professionals and employees who consider SD-WAN as a possible solution for their company’s business. / Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) är en framväxande teknik som har potential att tillgodose den ökande efterfrågan på tillförlitliga och effektiva Wide Area Networks (WAN) på företagsnätverksmarknaden. Denna avhandling fokuserar på huvudfunktionerna i ett SD-WAN-nätverk och på de tekniska utmaningarna för design och implementering av en SD-WAN-infrastruktur. Det ger också en detaljerad jämförelse mellan SD-WAN och andra WAN-lösningar som MultiProtocol Label Switching (MPLS). Avhandlingen bygger på projektet som handlar om migrering av nätverksinfrastruktur som använder MPLS-tekniken till en nätverksinfrastruktur som använder SD-WAN-tekniken. Migreringsprocessen omfattar många faser, till exempel analys av befintlig MPLS-baserad infrastruktur, identifiering av lämpliga apparater baserat på kundförfrågningar och utformningen av SD-WAN-infrastrukturen som kan implementeras utan att nätverket fungerar under övergångssteget. Avhandlingen ger en detaljerad beskrivning av dessa steg och diskuterar de avvägningar som gjordes under projektets designfas. Resultaten som presenteras i avhandlingen erhålls genom test på plats för den nya SD-WAN-infrastrukturen. Testerna utfördes i syfte att utvärdera några av de viktigaste SD-WAN-funktionerna som lastbalansering, trafikformning och hög tillgänglighet. De erhållna resultaten visar att nätinfrastrukturen fungerar effektivt och illustrerar några av de största fördelarna som den nya SD-WAN-infrastrukturen har jämfört med den gamla MPLS-infrastrukturen. Slutligen kan denna avhandling vara av intresse för nätverkspersonal och anställda som anser SD-WAN som en möjlig lösning för företagets verksamhet.

In our technological society, the growth of applications is not always followed by the growth of network capacity. There is an increasing demand of bandwidth which cannot always be answered properly. It is especially true in wireless networks such as 3G. Mobile devices can store and use more and more applications which are all using the bandwidth without any control. The Internet experience for the end user can thus be quickly degraded. In this respect, my objective in this thesis is to fill the gap on this matter by implementing a traffic shaping software working on Android devices. In order to get the necessary knowledge to create such an application, series of tests are conducted on similar software based on Windows 7. The outcome of this research is my own solution to shape the traffic on Android mobile devices. The software allows the end user to choose which of his applications should get a higher priority to improve his overall experience with them.

As Ethernet based networks have become the dominant choice for Flight Test Instrumentation (FTI) network applications, it is also clear that Ethernet based camera integration and applications have yet to become more wide spread for system level design and integration. A significant customer base utilizes either separate video compression systems or even just stand-a-lone gopro cameras for recording purposes in an unsynchronized ways. The use of uncompressed high definition (HD) video from GigE Vision Ethernet cameras for flight test applications is a significant issue in managing the large volumes of data produced by the cameras and forwarding them to any 1000BASE-T(x) switch port without packet loss and significant delays. Of course an easy approach to overcome this issue would be to just increase the network bandwidth from 1000BASE-T(x) to 10GBASE-SR, but most FTI systems just moved to 1000BASE-T(x) in the past years and therefore changing the overall system hardware is cost prohibited. One concern has been the use of compression algorithms to reduce the required video bandwidth, with the negative side effect that the image quality reduces and end-to-end latency increases, which is not acceptable for some applications. Further, it is important that data from cameras is available to a number of different multicast consumers within the FTI network, for example workstations, recorders and telemetry systems. These video data stream also require synchronization so that they can be analyzed in post processing.

WiFi networks are susceptible to statistical traffic analysis attacks. Despite encryption, the metadata of encrypted traffic, such as packet inter-arrival time and size, remains visible. This visibility allows potential eavesdroppers to infer private information in the Internet of Things (IoT) environment. For example, it allows for the identification of sleep monitors and the inference of whether a user is awake or asleep. WiFi eavesdropping theoretically enables the identification of IoT devices without the need to join the victim's network. This attack scenario is more realistic and much harder to defend against, thus posing a real threat to user privacy. However, researchers have not thoroughly investigated this type of attack due to the noisy nature of wireless channels and the relatively low accuracy of WiFi sniffers. Furthermore, many countermeasures proposed in the literature are inefficient in addressing side-channel leakage in WiFi networks. They often burden internet traffic with high data overhead and disrupt the user experience by introducing deliberate delays in packet transmission. This dissertation investigates privacy leakage resulting from WiFi eavesdropping and proposes efficient defensive techniques. We begin by assessing the practical feasibility of IoT device identification in WiFi networks. We demonstrate how an eavesdropper can fingerprint IoT devices by passively monitoring the wireless channel without joining the network. After exploring this privacy attack, we introduce a traffic spoofing-based defense within the WiFi channel to protect against such threats. Additionally, we propose a more data-efficient obfuscation technique to counter traffic analytics based on packet size without adding unnecessary noise to the traffic.

Quality of service is commonly used to shape network traffic to meet specified criteria. The various scenarios include limiting and reserving bandwidth for a particular application, host or user, prioritizing latency sensitive traffic or equal distribution of unreserved bandwidth. The DynShaper software distributes and controls a traffic quota by more sophisticated means than fixed per user limits and simple disconnection after the user reaches the limit. It distributes the quota on a daily basis, where each day receives the same share. The users are sorted into predefined groups with different bandwidths depending on their recent consumption. This classification is periodically updated to ensure the sorting order is maintained. The bandwidths of these groups is dynamically adjusted depending on the actual consumption to provide an efficient utilization. This thesis presents another distribution model using a case-based reasoning approach, a method for machine learning which is classified as conventional artificial intelligence. Case-based reasoning tries to solve new problems based on the solutions of similar problems from the past. Controlling the network traffic to remain within a fixed quota can be modeled as such a problem if the traffic patterns are recurring. Possible solutions can be derived from statistical data and altered to suit the new problems. When an untested solution is applied, the software supervises the execution and revises the solution accordingly, if the actual results deviate from the precalculated schedule.

Quality of service is commonly used to shape network traffic to meet specified criteria. The various scenarios include limiting and reserving bandwidth for a particular application, host or user, prioritizing latency sensitive traffic or equal distribution of unreserved bandwidth. The DynShaper software distributes and controls a traffic quota by more sophisticated means than fixed per user limits and simple disconnection after the user reaches the limit. It distributes the quota on a daily basis, where each day receives the same share. The users are sorted into predefined groups with different bandwidths depending on their recent consumption. This classification is periodically updated to ensure the sorting order is maintained. The bandwidths of these groups is dynamically adjusted depending on the actual consumption to provide an efficient utilization. This thesis presents another distribution model using a case-based reasoning approach, a method for machine learning which is classified as conventional artificial intelligence. Case-based reasoning tries to solve new problems based on the solutions of similar problems from the past. Controlling the network traffic to remain within a fixed quota can be modeled as such a problem if the traffic patterns are recurring. Possible solutions can be derived from statistical data and altered to suit the new problems. When an untested solution is applied, the software supervises the execution and revises the solution accordingly, if the actual results deviate from the precalculated schedule.