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5 - Network Layer Control Plane

This document provides an overview of the course EE5150 Communication Networks offered at IIT Madras from January to May 2024. It covers key topics in network layer control plane including routing protocols, software defined networking, and network management protocols like ICMP and SNMP. It also discusses routing algorithms like link-state routing, distance-vector routing, OSPF, and BGP. Finally, it introduces software defined networking and network management frameworks.

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33 views

5 - Network Layer Control Plane

This document provides an overview of the course EE5150 Communication Networks offered at IIT Madras from January to May 2024. It covers key topics in network layer control plane including routing protocols, software defined networking, and network management protocols like ICMP and SNMP. It also discusses routing algorithms like link-state routing, distance-vector routing, OSPF, and BGP. Finally, it introduces software defined networking and network management frameworks.

Uploaded by

ep21b004
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© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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EE5150, Communication Networks

(January - May 2024, IIT Madras)

1. The Network Layer: Control Plane

• control-plane: the network-wide logic that controls how a datagram is routed,


and also how network-layer components and services are configured and managed
• focus on routing protocols, software defined networking, ICMP and SNMP

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2. The Control plane

• the control plane logic may be implemented in every router distributedly or may
be logically centralized in a remote controller

• Google, Microsoft use a logically centralized control for their private networks

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3. Routing algorithms
• routing algorithms seek good paths from the source to the destination through
the series of routers
• the choice of route may depend on cost and policy considerations
• An abstraction of a network using a graph
– a graph G = (N, E) is a set N of nodes and a collection E of edges, where
each edge is a pair of nodes from N

– the edges may be directed and weighted


– If the pair (x, y) does not belong to E, we set c(x, y) to be infinity
– a natural question is to identify the least costly paths between sources and
destinations
– a path in a graph G = (N, E) is a sequence of nodes (x1, x2, ..., xp) such
that each of the pairs (x1,x2),(x2,x3),...,(xp-1,xp) are edges in E
– The cost of a path (x1, x2, g, xp) is simply the sum of all the edge costs
along the path, that is c(x1, x2) + c(x2, x3) + g + c(xp - 1, xp)
– Objective: Find a path between the source and destination that has least
cost
– if all the edges have the same cost, then the least cost path is the shortest
path
– routing algorithms may be centralized (having complete link state informa-
tion) or decentralized (computing paths in an iterative, distributed manner)
– routing algorithms may be static or dynamic
– routing algorithms may be load sensitive or load insensitive

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4. The Link-State routing algorithm

• in a link-state algorithm, the network topology and all link costs are known
• this is accomplished by having each node broadcast link-state packets to all other
nodes in the network
• all nodes have an identical and complete view of the network
• Each node can then run the LS algorithm and compute the same set of least-cost
paths as every other node
• Dijkstra’s algorithm computes the least-cost path from one node to all other
nodes in the network

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– the forwarding tables can now be updated!

– the implementation has a complexity of O(N 2 )

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5. Distance Vector routing algorithm

• distance- vector (DV) algorithm is iterative, asynchronous, and distributed


• Bellman-Ford update equation

dx (y) = min{c(x, v) + dv (y)}


v

The minimizer becomes the entry in a forwarding table


• DV algorithm: nodes maintain a list of neighbours, current minimum cost to
other nodes and exchange this cost with neighbouring nodes and update their
cost using the Bellman-Ford algorithm
• the algorithm is self-terminating!

• DV is a decentralized algorithm

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– the algorithm can adapt to changing weights!

– LS vs DV: message complexity, speed of convergence, robustness

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6. Intra-AS routing in the Internet: OSPF

• routers are organized in the Internet into autonomous systems (managed by a


single agency)
• intra-autonomous system routing protocol allows managing routers within an AS
• Open Shortest Path First (OSPF)
– OSPF (RFC 2328) is an open protocol
– OSPF is a link-state routing protocol
– OSPF computes shortest path to all subnets
– link costs are set by administrator
– link weights and traffic routers: which comes first?
– OSPF messages are carried using IP packets
– OSPF supports security, resilience, multicast, etc
• Routing Among the ISPs: BGP
– in the Internet, all ASs run the same inter-AS routing protocol, called the
Border Gateway Protocol
– BGP is a decentralized and asynchronous protocol in the vein of distance-
vector routing
– BGP permits advertising prefixes and to identify shortest path to such sub-
nets!

– hot potato routing in BGP - identify route with the least cost to the NEXT-
HOP router
• policy, scale and performance issues necessitate the need for two routing proto-
cols!

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7. SDN Control Plane

• Key characteristics of SDN


– flow-based forwarding (based on values in the transport, network and link
layer header fields)
– separation of data and control plane
– network control functions external to data plan switches
– a programmable network (based on APIs provided by the SDN controller)
• “unbundling” of network functionality - data plane switches, SDN controller and
network-control applications
– the functionalities may be provided by different vendors or entities

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• SDN controller does communication (e.g., OpenFlow), network-wide state man-
agement and provides APIs to network-control application layer (e.g., OpenDay-
light, ONOS)

• implemented in practice by a distributed set of servers for fault tolerance, high


availability, or for performance reasons
• OpenFlow operates over TCP, with a default port number of 6653

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8. ICMP: The Internet Control Message Protocol (RFC 792, RFC 4443)

• used by hosts and routers to communicate network-layer information to each


other
– error reporting, e.g., “Destination network unreachable”
• ICMP messages are carried inside IP datagrams (protocol number 1)
• ICMP messages have a type and a code field, and contain the header and the
first 8 bytes of the IP datagram that caused the ICMP message to be generated
– ping program sends an ICMP type 8 code 0 message to the specified host.
The destination host, seeing the echo request, sends back a type 0 code 0
ICMP echo reply

• Traceroute!

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9. Network Management and SNMP

• “Network management includes the deployment, integration, and coordination


of the hardware, software, and human elements to monitor, test, poll, configure,
analyze, evaluate, and control the network and element resources to meet the
real-time, operational performance, and Quality of Service requirements at a
reasonable cost”
• Network management framework
– Managing server, managed device, configuration/operational/statistical data,
management agent, network management protocol

• management by CLI or via HTTP, SNMP/MIB, NETCONF/YANG

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1 Exercises
1. What is the “count to infinity” problem in distance vector routing? (R5)

2. What two types of ICMP messages are received at the sending host executing the
Traceroute program? (R20)

3. Consider the figure below. Enumerate all paths from A to D that do not contain any
loops. (P1)

4. Consider the following network. With the indicated link costs, use Dijkstra’s shortest-
path algorithm to compute the shortest path from x to all network nodes. Show how
the algorithm works by computing a table similar to Table 5.1. (P3)

5. Consider the network shown below. Assume that each node initially knows the costs
to each of its neighbors. Consider the distance-vector algorithm and show the distance
table entries at node z. (P5)

6. Consider a general topology (that is, not the specific network shown above) and a
synchronous version of the distance-vector algorithm. Suppose that at each iteration,
a node exchanges its distance vectors with its neighbors and receives their distance
vectors. Assuming that the algorithm begins with each node knowing only the costs
to its immediate neighbors, what is the maximum number of iterations required before
the distributed algorithm converges? Justify your answer. (P6)

2 Reference
1. Chapter 5 (The Network Layer: Control Plane) of Kurose and Ross, Computer net-
working: A top-down approach

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