Dottorato in TECNOLOGIE DELL'INFORMAZIONE E DELLE COMUNICAZIONI (ICT)

Titolo della tesi: Investigating Black Holes in Segment Routing Networks: Identification and Detection

The new Segment Routing paradigm provides the network operator the possibility of highly increasing network performance exploiting advanced Traffic Engineering features and novel network programmability functions. Anyway, as any new solutions, SRv6 has a side effect: the introduction of unknown service disruption events. Network Black Holes (BHs) are logical failures that create a service disruption for a subset of traffic flows, generally due to device misconfiguration. Detection of a BH is a hard task due to its specific nature: the infrastructure is up and the disconnection affects a limited number of flows. An example of BH is the one caused by the failure of the Path MTU Discovery procedure in IPv6. The Segment Routing (SR) Architecture is an overlay infrastructure that realizes the source routing. SR exploits the connectivity service offered by the underlay IPv6 (SRv6). Thus SR inherits the problems related to BHs affecting IPv6. In SR this problem is even more stressed due to the encapsulation mechanism that is required to enforce the segment lists on packets. Even worse, existing active probing based tools to detect network BHs for IPv6 are not suitable in SR. In this paper I investigate the problem of detecting SR Black Holes in SR domains. First, I provide an experimental demonstration of the creation of an SR Black Holes. Then I show that existing tools based on active probing are not suitable to detect SR BHs. Then, a passive framework named Segment Routing Black Holes Detection (SR-BHD) is introduced. SRBHD make use of specific traffic counters available in SR capable nodes to verify the validity of the flow conservation principle on each network element. Experimental evaluation carried out through simulation and emulation shows the effectiveness of SR-BHD in detecting the presence of SR BHs