Overall, ICN-style receiver-driven forwarding can serve as a deployable overlay transport substrate for coordinated WAN multipath without requiring changes to IP routing.
Abstract
Multipath transport is important for Internet/WAN services that move data volumes across heterogeneous paths, including geo-distributed analytics, content distribution, and cloud-service pipelines. Existing solutions face a trade-off: end-to-end transports such as MPTCP and MPQUIC are deployable but limited by endpoint-visible paths and delayed congestion feedback, while routing- or forwarder-assisted approaches often require infrastructure support or lack safe coordination across forwarding choices. This paper presents MARS, a receiver-driven, forwarder-assisted multipath transport. MARS combines tier-synchronized overlay path discovery with coupled consumer/forwarder congestion control, enabling it to expand usable forwarding opportunities and react near bottlenecks. It runs as an incrementally deployable UDP overlay at clients, servers, relays, or CDN-like nodes. We implement MARS in simulation and as a prototype, and evaluate it through simulation and Mininet emulation across deployment scopes, loss rates, and a forwarding-face outage scenario. Results show MARS provides deployment-dependent benefits: with endpoint-only deployment, it performs comparably to the evaluated ECMP-limited configurations of MPTCP and MPQUIC. With cooperating overlay forwarders, it expands the usable path set from routing-exposed forwarding candidates. Across the tested loss conditions, it reduces maximum T95 by up to 66.7% and 63.9% relative to the evaluated path-expanded MPTCP and MPQUIC configurations, respectively, given the same path set. Path discovery remains lightweight, flow fairness remains high, and MARS degrades gracefully during an emulated forwarding-face outage and recovers quickly after face restoration. Overall, ICN-style receiver-driven forwarding can serve as a deployable overlay transport substrate for coordinated WAN multipath without requiring changes to IP routing.
While compute and application state for networked services are typically hosted on terrestrial servers, a specific subset of workloads such as multi-party interactive applications can benefit from in-orbit compute, particularly in regions with sparse terrestrial network infrastructure. Hosting stateful services on LEO satellites, however, introduces a fundamental challenge: the satellite serving a user changes every few minutes due to orbital motion, threatening to disrupt users' active connection sessions. This paper presents TETHER, a network abstraction that preserves application-visible connectivity despite continual satellite movement. TETHER combines persistent virtual IPs, anticipatory state migration, and transport continuity mechanisms to transparently relocate application state between satellites before performance degradation occurs. The system leverages Linux Checkpoint/Restore In Userspace (CRIU) for process migration and exploits predictable orbital trajectories to proactively schedule migrations. We explore two migration policies with different trade-offs between latency and overhead. directly-above migrates application state to the satellite closest to the user, minimizing latency at the cost of more frequent migrations. In contrast, edge-of-reachability migrates state to a satellite that can stay under an acceptable latency budget the longest, reducing migration frequency while tolerating higher latency. We evaluate both policies using the xeoverse LEO network emulator. Our results show that anticipatory migration preserves long-lived TCP sessions across satellite transitions and enables applications to trade latency tolerance against migration overhead.
Emi Digby, Nishanth R. Sastry· Proceedings of the ACM SIGCO...· 0 citations
Multipath QUIC aggregates the bandwidth available to multihomed clients. Path and stream scheduling policies are known to affect performance but rely on static, general-purpose approaches that fail to meet application requirements. We present a framework to request novel proxy-based services that require scheduling in network topologies with multiple paths to an HTTP/3 proxy. It repurposes the Extensible Prioritization Scheme (EPS) to convey tailored schedulers at the connection level. With our own open-source MASQUE implementation, Nada, we demonstrate that interplay by selecting a custom stream-aware scheduler at the proxy. A reproducible measurement campaign shows that such client-proxy cooperation with EPS as a platform enables Quality of Service to be requested for specific flows. Our contribution lays the groundwork for adaptive solutions that dynamically optimize for desired behaviors, such as handling path heterogeneity, without involving the target server.
Daniel Petri, Kilian Holzinger, Marcel Kempf et al.· Applied Networking Research...· 0 citations
Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have emerged as a critical enabler of intelligent transportation systems, particularly when integrated with 5G infrastructure to achieve high-throughput, low-latency vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication. Nevertheless, optimizing message routing in such environments remains a significant challenge, as the operational complexity and prohibitive cost of large-scale physical deployments severely limit empirical evaluation of alternative transmission strategies. This paper presents a stochastic Petri nets (SPNs) model for evaluating routing configurations in 5G-enabled vehicular ad hoc networks (5G-VANETs). The proposed model evaluates mean response time, drop probability, utilization, and throughput, enabling the identification of communication bottlenecks without requiring physical deployment. By abstracting the system's stochastic behavior through SPN formalism, the model supports both steady-state analysis and sensitivity evaluation under varying traffic workloads. Results demonstrate that Route 1, with direct RSU connection, achieves the lowest mean response time and highest throughput, while Route 3, which relays messages through a rear vehicle and an auxiliary RSU, yields the lowest drop probability. A sensitivity analysis based on Design of Experiments reveals that cloud capacity and cloud service time are the dominant factors affecting mean response time. The SPN model thus enables system architects to compare routing configurations, identify performance bottlenecks, and size infrastructure components without requiring physical deployment.
José Miquéias Araújo, L. Lopes, Luiz Nelson Lima et al.· Journal of Internet Services...· 0 citations
Civilian communication systems often fail during armed conflicts, political unrest, and large-scale Internet disruptions—precisely when reliable communication is most needed. This paper presents HERMES, a resilient hybrid communication architecture that integrates HTTP/IP networking, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) mesh communication, and Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) within a unified adaptive routing framework. Unlike conventional approaches that treat alternative transports as backup solutions, HERMES dynamically selects the most efficient transport path based on current network conditions using a transport-aware forwarding policy whose cost function combines round-trip time, transport preference, and observed link risk. The architecture is built on distributed microservices that support topology discovery, shortest-path routing, and fault-tolerant message delivery. Reliability is enhanced through acknowledgments, bounded retransmissions, duplicate suppression, and graceful degradation mechanisms, while end-to-end authenticated encryption (Noise XX with a Double Ratchet) ensures secure communication across transport changes. A prototype implementation developed in C# on .NET 9 was evaluated on a five-node testbed, and a custom Network Simulator 3 (NS-3) module was used to extend the evaluation to networks of up to 500 nodes, under multiple failure scenarios, including node crashes, network partitioning, and complete Internet outages. Experimental results show that HERMES maintains perfect or near-perfect delivery in static topologies, including during a complete Internet blackout that disables IP-only messaging. Compared with the published Delay-Tolerant Networking protocols Epidemic and PRoPHET at one hundred nodes, HERMES exceeds their delivery ratio in static and failure scenarios and remains within 0.06 of them under pedestrian mobility during blackout, while transmitting roughly 35× fewer bytes– and about 21× fewer even relative to the more bandwidth-efficient MaxProp baseline. Under coordinated drop attacks by adversarial relays, HERMES degrades gracefully where flooding-based baselines collapse. This approach demonstrates that resilient civilian communication can be effectively achieved through metric-driven adaptive multi-transport routing, making it suitable for disaster recovery, contested environments, and connectivity-limited regions.
Charbel El Gemayel, Joseph El Gemayel, Joseph Constantin· Network· 0 citations
The rapid advancements of next-generation vehicular networks require intelligent, low-latency, and efficient resource management to support heterogeneous services. In this work, we propose a Traffic-aware Dynamic Resource Allocation (TADRA) architecture for UAV-assisted vehicular O-RAN to address the challenges of dynamic traffic conditions, infrastructure failures, and stringent quality of service (QoS) requirements. Due to the dynamic mobility and flexible deployment characteristics, UAV Open Radio Units (O-RUs) in the TADRA architecture support the terrestrial infrastructure under overload or failure conditions, dynamically extending coverage, balancing traffic loads, and restoring service to maintain uninterrupted QoS across diverse and heterogeneous traffic demands. Unlike existing static or single-layer solutions, our proposed TADRA integrates RAN Intelligent Controllers (RICs) with a Hierarchical Traffic-Aware Multi-Agent Twin-Delayed (TMT) algorithm to optimize the allocation of computation and radio resources. This joint optimization problem is NP-hard, highly dynamic, and coupled across agents, making TMT a tractable and adaptive alternative. This hierarchical framework performs traffic prioritization at the upper (application) layer and resource allocation at the lower (MAC) layer, facilitating adaptive decision-making under diverse vehicular traffic patterns. Numerical results demonstrate that our solution provides substantial gains over MATD3, MADDPG, and GA, achieving 17% lower latency, 10% higher throughput, 14% lower energy consumption, and 6.5% higher reliability.
Hayla Nahom Abishu, Ahmed Badawy, Amr Mohamed et al.· IEEE Transactions on Network...· 0 citations
The integration of terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks is a key enabler for seamless global connectivity in 6G systems. Existing simulation tools typically address only one domain, lacking unified architectures for capturing transient protocol-level behavior during satellite mobility events. This paper introduces BrightLight, a hybrid emulation–simulation testbed for space–terrestrial integrated networks (STINs) that combines Linux network namespaces, NS-3 mmWave channel modeling, and an Open5GS core to execute real protocol stacks under configurable satellite mobility and gateway impairments. To demonstrate the platform's ability to capture fine-grained handover dynamics, we evaluate backhaul-aware handover over a Starlink-based constellation topology, comparing conventional satellite switching against inter-satellite link (ISL) assisted rerouting under ground-segment congestion. BrightLight successfully captures transient throughput evolution, TCP buffer drainage effects, and RTT dynamics throughout the handover process, revealing that routing via ISLs to uncongested ground stations substantially reduces latency and eliminates throughput degradation. These results validate BrightLight as an effective platform for studying protocol-level handover behavior in 6G STIN architectures.
Murat Parlakisik, Ertan Ozturk· International Mediterranean...· 0 citations