In the past century, numerous iterations of automation have changed our society significantly. In that perspective, the professional and personal availability of computing devices interconnected through the Internet has changed the way we eat, live and treat each other. Today, the Internet is a service as crucial to our society as public access to electricity, gas and water supplies. Due to its successful adoption, the Internet now serves applications that were unthinkable at the time of its initial designs when social media, online global market places and video streaming were still far out of reasonable imaginary reach. Early research initiatives worked on realizing a global network of interconnected computers, an aim clearly realized by the successful implementation of the Internet and the fact that the infrastructure still suffices to provide connectivity to an unforeseen growth and change in usage. The research field of future Internet aims at long-term improvements of the Internet architecture, trying to improve the network infrastructure such that it will also facilitate future growth and applications. In this dissertation, we have contributed to the field of future Internet by proposing, implementing and evaluating infrastructure improvements. Most of our work revolves around Software-Defined Networking (SDN), a network management architecture aiming at logical centralization and softwarization of network control through the separation of data plane and control plane functionality. In particular, we have assessed the feasibility and accuracy of network monitoring through SDN (see chapter 3), as well as contributed to the robustness and recovery of such networks under topology failure by speeding up failure detection and recovery (see chapter 4) and precomputation of network-wide per-failure protection paths (see chapter 5). In addition to SDN, we have contributed to Information-Centric Networking (ICN), a network architecture optimizing content distribution by implementing network-layer forwarding techniques and cache-placement strategies based on content identifiers. We have contributed to this field by introducing a globally-accessible namespace maintaining a feasible global-routing-table size through separation and translation of context-related and location-aggregated name components (see chapter 6). Considering the same demand for centralization and softwarization of network control found in SDN applies to other network architectures, we have designed a protocol-agnostic SDN scheme enabling fine-grained control of application-specific forwarding schemes. With our prototype, we evaluate an implementation of such an SDN-controlled ICN, demonstrating correct functionality in both partial and fully upgraded networks (see chapter 7). Besides working on future Internet topics, we have also taken a step aside and looked at more recent Internet architecture improvements. Specifically, we have performed measurements on the Domain Name System’s Security Extensions (DNSSEC). From these measurements we provide insight into the level of implementation and correctness of DNSSEC configuration. Through categorization of errors we explain their main causes and find the common denominators in misconfiguration (see chapter 8).@en

Quality of Service (QoS) control is an important concept in computer networking, as it is related to end-user experience. While providing QoS guarantees over the Internet has long been deemed too complicated, the emergence of Software- Defined Networking (SDN), and OpenFlow as its most popular standard, may facilitate QoS control.
In this paper, we consider how to enable bandwidth guarantees with OpenFlow. Our design allows QoS flows to send more than their guaranteed rates, as long as they do not hinder other guaranteed and/or best-effort flows.
Furthermore, our design uses OpenFlow’s meter table to aggregate traffic. Our traffic aggregation functionality only adds overhead to the first switch, but no other complexity is incurred at the subsequent switches.@en

The past century of telecommunications has shown that failures in networks are prevalent. Failure recovery processes are therefore needed. Failure recovery is mainly influenced by (1) detection of the failure, and (2) circumvention of the detected failure. However, especially in SDNs where controllers recompute network state reactively, this leads to high delays. Hence, next to primary rules, backup rules should be installed in the switches to quickly detour traffic once a failure occurs. In this work, we propose algorithms for computing an all-to-all primary and backup network forwarding configuration that is capable of circumventing link and node failures. After initial recovery, we recompute network configuration to guarantee protection from future failures. Our algorithms use packet-labeling to guarantee correct and shortest detour forwarding and are able to discriminate between link and node failures. The computational complexity of our solution is comparable to that of all-to-all shortest paths computations. Our experimental evaluation shows that network configuration complexity decreases significantly compared to classic disjoint paths computations. Finally, we provide a proof-of-concept OpenFlow controller in which our proposed configuration is implemented, demonstrating that it readily can be applied in production networks.
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DNSSEC offers protection against spoofing of DNS data by providing origin authentication, ensuring data integrity and authentication of non-existence by using public-key cryptography. Although the relevance of securing a technology as crucial to the Internet as DNS is obvious, the DNSSEC implementation increases the complexity of the deployed DNS infrastructure, which may result in misconfiguration. In this article, we measure and analyze the misconfigurations for domains in six zones (.bg, .br, .co, .com, .nl and .se). Furthermore, we categorize these misconfigurations and provide an explanation for their possible causes. Finally, we evaluate the effects of misconfigurations on the reachability of a zone’s network. Our results show that, although progress has been made in the implementation of DNSSEC, over 4 % of evaluated domains show misconfigurations. The domains with the most frequently appearing misconfiguration are often hosted at a very limited set of hosting providers. Of these misconfigured domains, almost 75 % were unreachable from a DNSSEC-aware resolver. This illustrates that although the authorities of a domain may think their DNS is secured, it is in fact not. Worse still, misconfigured domains are at risk of being unreachable from the clients who care about and implement DNSSEC verification, while the publisher may remain unaware of the error and its consequences.@en

The size and amount of e-science data sets is growing rapidly. Keeping up with the network demand in order to transfer these data sets over the Internet is a challenge. Single links do not have enough capacity anymore. Therefore we need to install more interfaces in the servers and use all available paths in the network. In this paper we describe two new technologies that help to optimally use the capacity of all multiple paths simultaneously. OpenFlow is used to discover the topology of the network,calculate multiple paths and configure those paths on the OpenFlow network. Multipath TCP (MPTCP) is used on the servers to distribute the load across the paths. We describe the end-to-end good put measurements we did in our OpenFlow test bed. We show that we reach a much higher throughput with multiple paths compared to a single path.@en