It is important to monitor routing protocols to ensure IP networks and their operations can maintain sufficient level of stability and reliability because IP routing is an essential part of such networks. In this paper, we focus on Open Shortest Path First (OSPF), a widely deployed intra-domain routing protocol. Routers running OSPF advertise their link states on Link State Advertisements (LSAs) as soon as they detect changes in their link states. In IP network operations, it is important for operators to ascertain the location and type of a failure in order to deal with failures adequately. We therefore studied IP network failure identification based on the monitoring of OSPF LSAs. There are three issues to consider in regard to identifying network failures by monitoring LSAs. The first is that multiple LSAs are flooded by a single failure. The second is the LSA delay, and the third is that multiple failures may occur simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a method of network failure identification based on a detailed analysis of OSPF LSA flooding that takes into account the above three issues.

This paper presents an IP performance management system having the triple frameworks of performance measurement, topology monitoring and data analysis. The system infers the causal location of the performance degradation with a network tomographic approach. Since the Internet is still highly prone to performance deterioration due to congestion, router failure, and so forth, not only detecting performance deterioration, but also monitoring topology and locating the performance-degraded segments in real-time is vital to ensure that Internet Service Providers can mitigate or prevent such performance deterioration. The system is implemented and evaluated through a real-world experiment and its considerable potential for practical network operations is demonstrated.

Recently, because of the expansion of TCP/IP networks, the evaluation of IP networks is being considered as a major task for network operators and administrators. As a result, many IP evaluation tools have appeared, but almost all of them can only be applied to a limited purpose. The authors have already developed an IP evaluation tool, called KITS (KDD Internet Test System) that can generate flexible load traffic. Based on KITS, the authors have now developed a new IP measurement tool. This paper describes the flexible and general IP evaluation tool, STAGE (Simulated Traffic Analyzer/generator for General Evaluation).

The current interdomain routing protocol, BGP, is not resilient to a path failure due to its single-path and slowly-converging route calculation. This paper proposes a novel approach to improve the resilience of the interdomain communication by enabling a set of ASes to form an alliance for themselves. The alliance members cooperatively discover a set of disjoint paths using not only the best routes advertised via BGP but also the ones unadvertised. Since such a set of disjoint paths are unlikely to share a link failure, a member AS can provide a pair of the other members with a transit to circumvent the failure. We evaluate how many disjoint paths we could discover from both advertised and hidden (unadvertised) routes by analyzing publicly available BGP route data. Our feasibility study indicates that an alliance of ASes can establish a set of disjoint paths between arbitrary pair of its alliance members with high probability to improve the resilience of interdomain routing among the members.

Application-aware Traffic Engineering (TE) plays a crucial role in ensuring quality of services (QoS) for recently emerging applications such as AR, VR, cloud gaming, and connected vehicles. While a deterministic application-aware TE is required for these mission-critical applications, a negotiation procedure between applications and network operators needs to undergo major simplification to fulfill the scalability of the application based on emerging microservices and container-based architecture. In this paper, we propose a NetworkAPI framework which allows an application to indicate a desired TE behavior inside IP packets by leveraging Segment Routing over IPv6 (SRv6). In the NetworkAPI framework, the TE behavior provided by the network operator is expressed as an SRv6 Segment Identifier (SID) in the form of a 128-bit IPv6 address. Because the IPv6 address of an SRv6 SID is distributed using IP anycast, the application can utilize the unchanged SRv6 SID regardless of the application's location, as if the application controls an API on the transport network. We implement a prototype of the NetworkAPI framework on a Linux kernel. On the prototype implementation, a basic packet forwarding performance is evaluated to demonstrate the feasibility of our framework.

The 6to4 method enables separate IPv6 sites to connect to the IPv6 Internet via a 6to4 relay router without an explicit IPv6-over-IPv4 tunnel setup. There are about a dozen open 6to4 relay routers worldwide but none of these have been installed in Japan. We therefore decided to evaluate the 6to4 mechanism and set ourselves the goal of improving the 6to4 operation within Japan. To accomplish this, in March 2002, we installed an open 6to4 relay router in Japan with the cooperation of the WIDE project and started this experiment. This paper describes our experiment and analysis of IPv6 traffic through our 6to4 relay router, as well as considerations derived from our experiment.