Ariba: Seamless Connectivity that "Just Works"

Ariba provides what services, and application seek: seamless connectivity that "just works". Providing this connectivity introduces increasing challenges, e.g., wireless network access, mobility, heterogenity, and, middle-boxes (e.g., firewalls, or NAT gateways) impede end-to-end communication and, therefore, the development of new services and application. Each of those challenges has its tailored solution. However, most of the solutions need dedicated support by the infrastructure, require manual configuration and do not adapt to changing network conditions. Furthermore, they often do not run across heterogeneous networks (e.g., pure IPv4, IPv6, or different networks behind NAT-gateways).

To ease development of services and applications, and, to deploy them spontaneously, we developed the ariba framework which is part of the spontaneous virtual networks (SpoVNet) project. Ariba provides service and application developers, a simple, yet extensive, interface which addresses the challenges described above. To this end, ariba itself uses Peer-to-Peer (P2P) techniques, to be independent of dedicated infrastructure. Therefore, it uses the resources of the end-systems only. Ariba deploys an P2P overlay network for each application. Self-organization of this overlay minimizes configuration overhead. Furthermore, the structure of the overlay adapts to changing conditions in the underlying network. Thus, applications do not need dedicated mechanisms to handle communication interruptions, or mobility, for example. To operate upon different networks ariba uses other participants as "relay" to provide connectivity between all end-systems.

Ariba is developed at the ​Institute of Telematics (research group of Prof. Zitterbart), Universität Karlsruhe (TH) as part of the ​SpoVNet project. The ​Baden-Württemberg Stiftung kindly funds this project within the Förderprogramm Informationstechnik Baden-Württemberg (BW-FIT) program.

Ariba is under active development and open to contributions.

If you have any questions regarding Ariba, please send an email to the info[at]ariba-underlay[dot]org or join the ​Ariba Google Groups.

If you publish research results based on Ariba, please cite ​this paper.

News

Nov 24, 2010

• Discuss with us on the ​SpoVNet Google Groups about ariba

Sep 21, 2010

• Ariba 0.5.0 and MCPO 0.4.0 released.

Jun 18, 2010

• The discussion forums for Ariba and Mcpo are now open: ​Ariba-Forum and ​Mcpo-Forum

Jun 18, 2010

• Anonymous SVN read-only access is now available for Ariba and Mcpo. You can browse it here: ​Ariba-SVN and ​MCPO-SVN. And check it out here: svn co https://i72projekte.tm.kit.edu/SpoVNet-KA/entwicklung/ariba/trunk and svn co https://i72projekte.tm.kit.edu/SpoVNet-KA/entwicklung/mcpo/trunk

May 14, 2010

• Compiling and installing Ariba on OpenWrt Routers

Mar 22, 2010

• ​ariba 0.4.0 released

Mar 17, 2010

• Ariba Legacy Demo presented at IEEE INFOCOM 2010. We will release the Legacy support version soon.

Aug 20, 2009

• Ariba was 2nd best demo at ACM SIGCOMM'09

The Ariba Group attended this year's ACM SIGCOMM 2009 in Barcelona to present the demo "Reconnecting the Internet with ariba: Self-Organizing Provisioning of End-to-End Connectivity in Heterogeneous Networks". The demonstration covered a scenario in which several heterogeneous protocols and devices were connected in face of network changes and reconfigurations. There was a huge interest in the topic and fruitful discussions.
The demo was awarded a Honorable Mention by the committee and therewith made it 2nd best demonstration out of 25.
See pictures below and ​SIGCOMM 2009 Demos.

Aug 20, 2009

• Release Ariba 0.3.0 - SIGCOMM'09 Demo
  • The SIGCOMM'09 Demo state of Ariba, Mcpo, and AnyChat is released
  • ​ariba-0.3.0 the underlay abstraction
  • ​mcpo-0.2.0 exemplary ALM service based on NICE
  • ​anychat-0.1.0 examplary chat application based on Ariba and Mcpo

Jun 10, 2009

• Release Ariba 0.2.1
  • ​source package ariba-0.2.1
  • Adapted to new Libraries APR v1.3.5 (Apache Portable Runtime) and APR-util v1.3.7

May 27, 2009

• Release Ariba 0.2.0, MCPO 0.1.0
  • ​source package ariba-0.2.0, ​documentation
  • Major release that includes a new Chord-based overlay structure, ALM service MCPO, new API, auto-links, and a large number of enhancements
  • Exemplary service MCPO (Multicast/Multipeer Overlay) on top of Ariba
  • ​source package mcpo-0.1.0, ​documentation
  • see ​Milestone Release 0.2.0

January 22, 2009

• Release Ariba 0.1.0
  • ​source package ariba-0.1.0 and ​documentation
  • Still under heavy development
  • Featuring Ping-Pong Example for demonstration purpose