The LISP-Lab Platform for Future Internet Services – LISP-Lab

LISP-Lab is an experimentation platform that is unique by conception and by its objectives. The LISP-Lab project is meant to facilitate collaboration between academics, industry and service providers, to foster the adoption of the LISP protocol while assessing the performances and the scalability of the protocol under various use cases and services. The range of technical tasks planned in the LISP-Lab project are motivated by several typical LISP use cases like cloud networking mobile access networking, and inter-domain connectivity. LISP can be used to enforce traffic engineering policies, while the project investigates the design and the operation of the LISP mapping system for the sake of optimized traffic forwarding.

The LISP-Lab platform is multi-party in its very nature, being the collaborative result of a first class consortium composed of academic institutions (Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Télécom ParisTech), public interest groups (RENATER, Rezopole) and industrial partners (Border6, AlphaLink, NonStopSystems, Orange, Ucopia). The LISP- Lab project aims at becoming a major actor that will actively contribute to the LISP standardization effort, with a strong impact on the networking industry and the Internet ecosystem at large. It will provide industrial leadership through scientific dissemination and contributions in the most important ICT forums like, for instance, the French Operators Network Group. The LISP-Lab project also focuses on open source software, which will be used to provide both academy and industry with the tools to conduct high quality research and develop new products. Interested external parties will be invited to join the LISP-Lab platform in the aim of creating a long lasting effort that will go beyond this specific project call and span across borders, thereby creating the seeds for future international collaboration.

Accordingly to the project milestones, the platform is completely operational 12 months after the project kicked off in September 2014. More precisely, the platform includes:
- 8 national sites: Alphalink, Border6, LIP6, Non Stop Systems, Orange, Rezopole, Telecom ParisTech, Ucopia.
- Proxy gateways from and towards the Internet, one proxy P-ITR and one proxy P-ETR.
- A distributed mapping system, with mapping servers and resolvers in the LIP6, Rezopole and Telecom ParisTech sites.
- A network core deployed by Renater to reliably connect the LIP6, Rezopole and Telecom ParisTech premises.
- The deployment of two DDT roots and their interconnection to the world-wide hierarchy (http://www.ddt-root.org).

After having successfully performed a series of performance and reliability tests for a few months, the platform will be opened to external partners in France and worldwide as soon as 2015. An extension of the network core of the platform to the European scale is being considered in order to increase the impact of the platform and facilitate the adoption of the LISP technology by a maximum of stakeholders.

D. C. Phung, S. Secci, D. Saucez, L. Iannone, The OpenLISP Control-Plane Architecture. IEEE Network Magazine, Vol. 38, No. 2, pp: 34-40, Avril 2014.

P. Raad, S. Secci, D. C. Phung, A. Cianfrani, P. Gallard, G. Pujolle, Achieving Sub-Second Downtime in Large-Scale Virtual Machine Migrations with LISP. IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp: 133-143, Juin 2014.

M. Coudron, S. Secci, G. Pujolle, P. Raad, P. Gallard, Cross-Layer Cooperation to Boost Multipath TCP Performance in Cloud Networks. In proceedings of IEEE International Conference in Cloud Networking (IEEE CloudNet'13), San Francisco (USA), Novembre 2013.

L. Iannone, D. Lewis, D. Meyer, V. Fuller, LISP EID Block. IETF Work in Progress draft-ietf-lisp-eid-block-09. Juillet 2014.

The ever-increasing growth of the Internet, accelerated by the massive deployment of mobile data services and other bandwidth-greedy services like IPTV, the deployment of new services based on the cloud computing paradigm, and the ubiquitous use of multi-homing and enhanced traffic engineering, has lately raised issues leading to an increasing concern on the scalability of today’s Internet architecture. These issues are mostly due to the use of a single numbering space, namely the IP addressing space, for both host transport sessions identification and network routing. Based on the separation of the end-systems’ addressing space (the identifiers) and the routing locators’ space, the Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) started as a research effort in the Routing Research Group but made its way to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), becoming a very attractive technology for Future Internet Architecture. LISP can indeed be used to accommodate the perceived Internet growth, while facilitating the deployment of new services.
In such a context, the design and operation of LISP networks naturally encourages the need for a large scale flexible platform that would not only facilitate the development of disruptive research in the area of advanced IP forwarding paradigms, but would also ease the prototyping of new LISP-based services. These are key points in order to grasp the full implications of such architecture, assess its benefits and performance under various conditions, as well as obtaining the know-how necessary to take full advantage, add new features, and develop new products. The existing LISP beta network [16], which played a key role in designing and testing LISP’s basic features, has, however, strong limitations due to its central and monolithic control by one single commercial actor. As such, it does not represent the optimal environment neither to explore innovative services, nor to develop new enhanced features. No use to mention, that disruptive research and evaluation of multi-party scenarios is not possible.
The LISP-Lab project aims at filling this gap, building an open platform, based on the LISP architecture, providing the environment to perform high quality research and support the design, development, and thorough assessment of new services and use-cases. The LISP-Lab Project is not meant to create a competitor of the LISP beta network [16], rather, through collaboration, to complement it by technical contributions in such a way as to overcome existing limitations. The range of technical tasks planned in the LISP-Lab project, from cloud networking, to access technology, through inter-domain connectivity, traffic engineering, and mapping management, has a larger scope than the LISP beta network, boosting innovation beyond the LISP technology itself.
The LISP-Lab platform will be multi-party in its very nature, being the collaborative result of a first class consortium composed of academic institutions (Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Télécom ParisTech), public interest groups (RENATER, Rezopole) and industrial partners (Border6, AlphaLink, NonStopSystems, France Telecom Orange, Ucopia). The LISP-Lab project aims at becoming a main actor in driving future evolution of the LISP standardization, with strong impact on the networking industry and the Internet ecosystem at large. It will provide industrial leadership through scientific dissemination and contributions in the most important ICT forums like for instance the French Operators Network Group. The LISP-Lab project focuses as well on open source software, developed in order to provide both academy and industry with the tools to perform high quality research and develop new products. Interested external parties will be invited to join the LISP-Lab platform in the aim of creating a long lasting effort going beyond this specific project call and beyond national borders, creating the seeds for a bigger and even more advanced international collaboration.