iTeleScope: Intelligent Video Telemetry and Classification in Real-Time using Software Defined Networking

Video continues to dominate network traffic, yet operators today have poor visibility into the number, duration, and resolutions of the video streams traversing their domain. Current approaches are inaccurate, expensive, or unscalable, as they rely on statistical sampling, middle-box hardware, or packet inspection software. We present {\em iTelescope}, the first intelligent, inexpensive, and scalable SDN-based solution for identifying and classifying video flows in real-time. Our solution is novel in combining dynamic flow rules with telemetry and machine learning, and is built on commodity OpenFlow switches and open-source software. We develop a fully functional system, train it in the lab using multiple machine learning algorithms, and validate its performance to show over 95\% accuracy in identifying and classifying video streams from many providers including Youtube and Netflix. Lastly, we conduct tests to demonstrate its scalability to tens of thousands of concurrent streams, and deploy it live on a campus network serving several hundred real users. Our system gives unprecedented fine-grained real-time visibility of video streaming performance to operators of enterprise and carrier networks at very low cost.Comment: 12 pages, 16 figure

Global state, local decisions: Decentralized NFV for ISPs via enhanced SDN

The network functions virtualization paradigm is rapidly gaining interest among Internet service providers. However, the transition to this paradigm on ISP networks comes with a unique set of challenges: legacy equipment already in place, heterogeneous traffic from multiple clients, and very large scalability requirements. In this article we thoroughly analyze such challenges and discuss NFV design guidelines that address them efficiently. Particularly, we show that a decentralization of NFV control while maintaining global state improves scalability, offers better per-flow decisions and simplifies the implementation of virtual network functions. Building on top of such principles, we propose a partially decentralized NFV architecture enabled via an enhanced software-defined networking infrastructure. We also perform a qualitative analysis of the architecture to identify advantages and challenges. Finally, we determine the bottleneck component, based on the qualitative analysis, which we implement and benchmark in order to assess the feasibility of the architecture.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

To mesh or not to mesh: flexible wireless indoor communication among mobile robots in industrial environments

Mobile robots such as automated guided vehicles become increasingly important in industry as they can greatly increase efficiency. For their operation such robots must rely on wireless communication, typically realized by connecting them to an existing enterprise network. In this paper we motivate that such an approach is not always economically viable or might result in performance issues. Therefore we propose a flexible and configurable mixed architecture that leverages on mesh capabilities whenever appropriate. Through experiments on a wireless testbed for a variety of scenarios, we analyse the impact of roaming, mobility and traffic separation and demonstrate the potential of our approach