A Network Service Provider Perspective on Network Slicing

This work has been performed in the framework of the H2020 project 5GTRANSFORMER (Grant Agreement no. 761536) and EUB project NECOS (Grant Agreement no. 777067), which are partly funded by the European Commission. This information reflects the consortia views, but neither the consortia nor the European Commission are liable for any use that may be done of the information contained therei

Dataplane Specialization for High-performance OpenFlow Software Switching

OpenFlow is an amazingly expressive dataplane program- ming language, but this expressiveness comes at a severe performance price as switches must do excessive packet clas- sification in the fast path. The prevalent OpenFlow software switch architecture is therefore built on flow caching, but this imposes intricate limitations on the workloads that can be supported efficiently and may even open the door to mali- cious cache overflow attacks. In this paper we argue that in- stead of enforcing the same universal flow cache semantics to all OpenFlow applications and optimize for the common case, a switch should rather automatically specialize its dat- aplane piecemeal with respect to the configured workload. We introduce ES WITCH , a novel switch architecture that uses on-the-fly template-based code generation to compile any OpenFlow pipeline into efficient machine code, which can then be readily used as fast path. We present a proof- of-concept prototype and we demonstrate on illustrative use cases that ES WITCH yields a simpler architecture, superior packet processing speed, improved latency and CPU scala- bility, and predictable performance. Our prototype can eas- ily scale beyond 100 Gbps on a single Intel blade even with complex OpenFlow pipelines

Service Orchestration and Federation for Verticals

The next generation mobile transport networks shall transform into flexible and agile SDN/NFV-based transport and computing platforms, capable of simultaneously supporting the needs of different vertical industries, e.g., automotive, e-health and media, by meeting a diverse range of networking and computing requirements. Network slicing, has emerged as the most promising approach to address this challenge by enabling per-slice management of virtualized resources and provisioning and managing slices tailored to the needs of different vertical industries. Service orchestration is the key enabler for slicing that allows efficient placement of virtual network functions over the infrastructure as well as optimal allocation of virtual resources among all network slices to deliver guaranteed, reliable and scalable services of different verticals. Besides, due to the limited footprint of infrastructure operators, it is also required to enable the interconnection and federation of multiple administrative domains, to effectively allow services to span across several providers. This paper presents the design of Service Orchestrator (SO) in the 5G- TRANSFORMER system, which deals with service orchestration and federation across multiple domains.This work has been partially funded by the EU H2020 5G-TRANSFORMER Project (grant no. 761536

Resource slicing in virtual wireless networks: a survey

New architectural and design approaches for radio access networks have appeared with the introduction of network virtualization in the wireless domain. One of these approaches splits the wireless network infrastructure into isolated virtual slices under their own management, requirements, and characteristics. Despite the advances in wireless virtualization, there are still many open issues regarding the resource allocation and isolation of wireless slices. Because of the dynamics and shared nature of the wireless medium, guaranteeing that the traffic on one slice will not affect the traffic on the others has proven to be difficult. In this paper, we focus on the detailed definition of the problem, discussing its challenges. We also provide a review of existing works that deal with the problem, analyzing how new trends such as software defined networking and network function virtualization can assist in the slicing. We will finally describe some research challenges on this topic.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Network slicing via function decomposition and flexible network design

Proceeding of: IEEE 28th Annual International Symposium on Personal, Indoor, and Mobile Radio Communications (PMRC 2017)We argue for flexible network design as an architecture prototype for next generation networks. Such flexible design is developed by capitalizing on the concept of network function decomposition in conjunction with with its relation to network slicing. A detailed view of the proposed functional architecture is put forward, where the role of network function blocks for forming network slices with given requirements is underlined. We further highlight the impact of common architecture over multiple tenants and elaborate on the emerging multi-tenancy business models along with the resulting implications on security.This work has been performed in the framework of the H2020-ICT-2014-2 project 5G NORMA

High performance network function virtualization for user-oriented services

The Network Function Virtualization (NFV) paradigm proposes to transform those network functions today running on dedicated and often closed appliances (e.g., firewall, wan accelerator) into pure software images, called Virtual Network Functions (VNFs), which can be consolidated and executed on high-volume standard servers. In this context, this dissertation focuses on the possibility of enabling each single end user (and not only network operators) to set up network services by means of NFV, allowing him to custoimize the set of services that are active on his Internet connection. This goal mainly requires to address flexibility and performance issues. Regarding to the former, it is important: (i) to support services including both network (e.g., firewall) and cloud (e.g., storage server) applications; (ii) to allow the user to define the service with an intuitive and high-level abstraction, hiding infrastructure-layer details. Instead, with respect to performance, multiple software-based services operating on the user's traffic should not introduce penalties in the user’s Internet experience. This dissertation solves the above issues by proposing a number of improvements in the context of Network Function Virtualization, both in terms of high level models and architectures to define and instantiate network services, and in terms of mechanisms to efficiently interconnect VNFs. Experimental results demonstrate that the goal of allowing end users to deploy services operating on their own traffic is feasible without impacting the Internet experience