arXiv subjects

Habib Mostafaei

Publications and source records attributed to Habib Mostafaei.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

A Survey of Timing Variability in Microservice-Based Software-Defined Vehicles

Microservice-based systems are modular and adaptable, but their distributed structure makes their timing behavior difficult to analyze and guarantee. Because latency emerges from interactions among service dependencies, shared resources, and coordinating middleware, local timing disturbances can propagate into system-level effects. This survey examines the sources, propagation mechanisms, and observable impacts of timing variability in microservice-based systems, using software-defined vehicles as a motivating example. It compares major classes of timing models by their assumptions about workload stability, execution structure, resource sharing, observability, and guarantee admissibility, and summarizes their limitations within microservice-based software-defined vehicles.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2026

Meshlib: In-Process Policy Enforcement for Sidecar-less Service Meshes

Service meshes facilitate service-to-service communication and enforce security policies in microservice architectures. However, they often depend on per-pod sidecar proxies, which introduce significant latency and resource overhead due to redundant application-layer parsing on every request. Eliminating sidecars without compromising security guarantees remains a central challenge. To address this, we introduce Meshlib, a sidecar-less service mesh extension built on Cilium as a control-plane extension. Meshlib incorporates a non-intrusive application-bound library that enforces Layer-7 policies within the application process, while delegating transport-level identity and routing to Cilium's eBPF-based data plane. This separation of responsibilities removes sidecar-induced latency and maintains the security semantics of the service mesh. The architecture remains fully interoperable with unmodified services, enabling incremental adoption within existing deployments. We evaluate Meshlib against Istio, Linkerd, and unmodified Cilium on the TrainTicket benchmark, enforcing 126 security policies across 37 services and show that it achieves the lowest end-to-end latency of all evaluated configurations with comparable resource overhead.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2026

MeshGuard: MUD-Based Network Access Control for Large-Scale Thread-Powered IoT Networks

The IETF standard Manufacturer Usage Description (MUD) enables manufacturers to equip IoT devices with certified URLs that provide traffic profiles for those devices, helping administrators enforce network access control. However, MUD assumes devices operate on full IP stacks and therefore does not account for constrained IoT devices running Thread--the dominant low-power mesh networking standard--which lacks complete TCP/IP functionality. While prior work proposes extensions to support MUD in Thread environments, these approaches are limited to simple topologies with a single border router and do not scale to realistic deployments with multiple, heterogeneous border routers. We introduce MeshGuard, a framework enabling MUD-based access control in complex Thread networks, with any number of border routers. MeshGuard extends the Mesh Link Establishment (MLE) protocol to deliver MUD information from constrained devices to border routers regardless of network topology. Moreover, MeshGuard leverages Software-Defined Networking (SDN) to synchronize access control lists across all routers. Experiments on our proof-of-concept with real devices (nRF5340, nRF52833, Raspberry-Pi 3) demonstrate enhanced security, minimal overhead, and linear scalability compared to state-of-the-art approaches.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

BShare: Packet Queueing Delay-Driven Buffer Sharing for Datacenter Switches

Modern datacenter switches share packet buffers across ports to boost overall throughput and reduce packet loss. However, as buffer availability per-port-per-bandwidth unit continues to decrease, existing buffer-sharing strategies face increasing performance challenges. Recent efforts have attempted to integrate Buffer Management (BM) with Active Queue Management (AQM) to harness the advantages of both BM and AQM approaches to improve performance. While these hybrid solutions show promise, their complexity of dynamically calculating multiple factors for integration hinders generalization and efficiency. This paper presents BShare, a simple buffer sharing mechanism that uses packet queueing delay. BShare requires only a single operator-configurable parameter. Our simulation results show that BSHARE improves the flow completion time (FCT) performance of advanced transport protocols, such as PowerTCP, by up to 45.07% compared to ABM, particularly under burst-heavy datacenter workloads.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2024

A Demand-aware Networked System Using Telemetry and ML with ReactNET

Emerging network applications ranging from video streaming to virtual/augmented reality need to provide stringent quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees in complex and dynamic environments with shared resources. A promising approach to meeting these requirements is to automate complex network operations and create self-adjusting networks. These networks should automatically gather contextual information, analyze how to efficiently ensure QoS requirements, and adapt accordingly. This paper presents ReactNET, a self-adjusting networked system designed to achieve this vision by leveraging emerging network programmability and machine learning techniques. Programmability empowers ReactNET by providing fine-grained telemetry information, while machine learning-based classification techniques enable the system to learn and adjust the network to changing conditions. Our preliminary implementation of ReactNET in P4 and Python demonstrates its effectiveness in video streaming applications.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2023

RIFO: Pushing the Efficiency of Programmable Packet Schedulers

Packet scheduling is a fundamental networking task that recently received renewed attention in the context of programmable data planes. Programmable packet scheduling systems such as those based on Push-In First-Out (PIFO) abstraction enabled flexible scheduling policies, but are too resource-expensive for large-scale line rate operation. This prompted research into practical programmable schedulers (e.g., SP-PIFO, AIFO) approximating PIFO behavior on regular hardware. Yet, their scalability remains limited due to extensive number of memory operations. To address this, we design an effective yet resource-efficient packet scheduler, Range-In First-Out (RIFO), which uses only three mutable memory cells and one FIFO queue per PIFO queue. RIFO is based on multi-criteria decision-making principles and uses small guaranteed admission buffers. Our large-scale simulations in Netbench demonstrate that despite using fewer resources, RIFO generally achieves competitive flow completion times across all studied workloads, and is especially effective in workloads with a significant share of large flows, reducing flow completion time up to 4.91x in datamining workload compared to state-of-the-art solutions. Our prototype implementation using P4 on Tofino switches requires only 650 lines of code, is scalable, and runs at line rate.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2021

TEL: Low-Latency Failover Traffic Engineering in Data Plane

Modern network applications demand low-latency traffic engineering in the presence of network failure while preserving the quality of service constraints like delay and capacity. Fast Re-Route (FRR) mechanisms are widely used for traffic re-routing purposes in failure scenarios. Control plane FRR typically computes the backup forwarding rules to detour the traffic in the data plane when the failure occurs. This mechanism could be computed in the data plane with the emergence of programmable data planes. In this paper, we propose a system (called TEL) that contains two FRR mechanisms, namely, TEL-C and TEL-D. The first one computes backup forwarding rules in the control plane, satisfying max-min fair allocation. The second mechanism provides FRR in the data plane. Both algorithms require minimal memory on programmable data planes and are well-suited with modern line rate match-action forwarding architectures (e.g., PISA). We implement both mechanisms on P4 programmable software switches (e.g., BMv2 and Tofino) and measure their performance on various topologies. The obtained results from a datacenter topology show that our FRR mechanism can improve the flow completion time up to 4.6x$-$7.3x (i.e., small flows) and 3.1x$-$12x (i.e., large flows) compared to recirculation-based mechanisms, such as F10, respectively.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2017

Leveraging SDN to Monitor Critical Infrastricture Networks in a Smarter Way

In critical infrastructures, communication networks are used to exchange vital data among elements of Industrial Control Systems (ICSes). Due to the criticality of such systems and the increase of the cybersecurity risks in these contexts, best practices recommend the adoption of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSes) as monitoring facilities. The choice of the positions of IDSes is crucial to monitor as many streams of data traffic as possible. This is especially true for the traffic patterns of ICS networks, mostly confined in many subnetworks, which are geographically distributed and largely autonomous. We introduce a methodology and a software architecture that allow an ICS operator to use the spare bandwidth that might be available in over-provisioned networks to forward replicas of traffic streams towards a single IDS placed at an arbitrary location. We leverage certain characteristics of ICS networks, like stability of topology and bandwidth needs predictability, and make use of the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm. We fulfill strict requirements about packet loss, for both functional and security aspects. Finally, we evaluate our approach on network topologies derived from real networks.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2014

A Coverage Monitoring algorithm based on Learning Automata for Wireless Sensor Networks

To cover a set of targets with known locations within an area with limited or prohibited ground access using a wireless sensor network, one approach is to deploy the sensors remotely, from an aircraft. In this approach, the lack of precise sensor placement is compensated by redundant de-ployment of sensor nodes. This redundancy can also be used for extending the lifetime of the network, if a proper scheduling mechanism is available for scheduling the active and sleep times of sensor nodes in such a way that each node is in active mode only if it is required to. In this pa-per, we propose an efficient scheduling method based on learning automata and we called it LAML, in which each node is equipped with a learning automaton, which helps the node to select its proper state (active or sleep), at any given time. To study the performance of the proposed method, computer simulations are conducted. Results of these simulations show that the pro-posed scheduling method can better prolong the lifetime of the network in comparison to similar existing method.

cs.NI↗