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.

In this paper, we suggest a new technology called Content Anycasting, and we show our design and evaluation of it. Content Anycasting shows how to utilize the capabilities of one of the candidate future Internet technologies that is the Flow-based network as in OpenFlow to giving new opportunities to the future internet that are currently not available. Content Anycasting aims to provide more flexible and dynamic redirection of contents. This would be very useful in extending the content server's capacity by enabling it to serve more clients, and in improving the response of the P2P networks by reducing the time of joining P2P networks. This method relies on three important ideas which are; the content based networking, decision making by the network in a similar manner to anycast, and the participation of user clients in providing the service. This is done through the use of the flow-based actions in flow-based network and having some modifications to the content server and client.

Anycast refers to the transmission of data from a source node to (any) one member in the group of designed recipients in a network. When the physical network and the set of anycast requests are given, the Anycast Routing and Wavelength Assignment (ARWA) problem is to find a set of light-paths, one for each source, for anycasting messages to any one of the member in the anycast destination group such that not any path using the same wavelength passes through the same link. The goal of the ARWA problem is to minimize the number of used wavelengths. In this paper, the ARWA problem is formulated and studied; since ARWA problem is NP-hard, a three-phase genetic algorithm is proposed to solve it. This algorithm is used to find the close-to-optimal solution. Simulated results show that the proposed algorithm is able to achieve good performance.

Anycast refers to the transmission of data from a source node to (any) one member in the group of designed recipients in a network. When the physical network and the set of anycast requests are given, the WDM anycast routing problem (WARP) is to find a set of light-paths, one for each source, for anycasting messages to one of the member in the anycast destination group such that not any path using the same wavelength passes through the same link. The goal of the WARP is to minimize the number of used wavelengths. In this paper, the WARP is formulated and studied, since WARP is NP-hard, several heuristic algorithms and a hybrid method which combines heuristic and simulated annealing techniques are proposed to solve it. These algorithms are used to find the close-to-optimal solution. Simulated results show that the proposed algorithms are able to achieve good performance.

Real-world IP networks are heterogeneous in terms of server and link capacities. A sophisticated and comprehensive load balancing method is essential if we are to avoid congestion in the servers and links of heterogeneous networks. If such a method is not available, network throughput is limited by bottleneck servers or links. This paper proposes an anycast technique that achieves load balancing under heterogeneity. The proposed method well suits implementation on active networks. By taking advantage of the processing ability provided by active nodes, the method can decide packet routes flexibly on the basis of various criteria to realize a variety of load balancing schemes. Some of these schemes can successfully prevent the congestion of heterogeneous networks by tackling bottlenecks in both server and link capacities. The method is also advantageous given its light control load even when using many mirrored servers. Computer simulations confirm the effectiveness of these features.

In server load balancing where replicated servers are dispersed geographically and accesses from clients are distributed to replicated servers, a way of distributing the accesses from clients to an adequate server plays an important role from the viewpoint of load balancing. In the paper, we propose a new network paradigm for server load balancing using active anycast. In active anycast, an end user only sends its request to group of servers using an anycast address. When this request arrives at an active router, it selects an adequate server from the viewpoint of load balancing and changes the anycast address of a packet to the unicast address of the selected server. The decision which server is the best one from the viewpoint of server load balancing is made by an active router rather than an end user, so active anycast is a network-initiated method. Simulation results show that active anycast can accomplish efficient server load balancing, even when a small part of routers are equipped with active network technology.