On Blockchain Performance Enhancement: A Systematic Map of Strategies Used

Blockchain technology is one among the recent innovations in the computing industry. Blockchains have gathered a widespread interest in the industry mainly due to their security promise. Despite the anticipated benefits of Blockchains, there are several limitations which make the technology less suitable in large scale applications such as banking, one being low throughput. Several initiatives to improve the throughput of Blockchains are being tried out both in the academia and the business worlds but no systematic classification of the initiatives and the strategies used has been done. This study explores Blockchain performance improvement initiatives and classify the initiatives by the improvement strategy used. This study has found that, out of 365 articles on the area of Blockchain performance, 300 were solution proposals aimed at improving the performance of Blockchains. The most used strategies in these proposals were alternative to PoW, sharding and multi-chain architecture

A systematic review of blockchain hardware acceleration architectures

The aim of this paper is to provide a systematic literature review of blockchain hardware acceleration. Blockchain technology has achieved significant attention in recent years particularly in the area of cryptocurrency however it is gaining popularity in other applications such as supply chain management and e-government. Based on a structured, systematic review of the relevant literature, we present a classification of the primary areas in blockchain technology that make use of heterogeneous hardware for accelerating certain blockchain functions. Based on these findings, we identify various research gaps and future exploratory directions that are anticipated to be of significant value both for academics and industry practitioners

NFV Platforms: Taxonomy, Design Choices and Future Challenges

Due to the intrinsically inefficient service provisioning in traditional networks, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) keeps gaining attention from both industry and academia. By replacing the purpose-built, expensive, proprietary network equipment with software network functions consolidated on commodity hardware, NFV envisions a shift towards a more agile and open service provisioning paradigm. During the last few years, a large number of NFV platforms have been implemented in production environments that typically face critical challenges, including the development, deployment, and management of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). Nonetheless, just like any complex system, such platforms commonly consist of abounding software and hardware components and usually incorporate disparate design choices based on distinct motivations or use cases. This broad collection of convoluted alternatives makes it extremely arduous for network operators to make proper choices. Although numerous efforts have been devoted to investigating different aspects of NFV, none of them specifically focused on NFV platforms or attempted to explore their design space. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on the NFV platform design. Our study solely targets existing NFV platform implementations. We begin with a top-down architectural view of the standard reference NFV platform and present our taxonomy of existing NFV platforms based on what features they provide in terms of a typical network function life cycle. Then we thoroughly explore the design space and elaborate on the implementation choices each platform opts for. We also envision future challenges for NFV platform design in the incoming 5G era. We believe that our study gives a detailed guideline for network operators or service providers to choose the most appropriate NFV platform based on their respective requirements. Our work also provides guidelines for implementing new NFV platforms

Advancing SDN from OpenFlow to P4: a survey

Software-defined Networking (SDN) marked the beginning of a new era in the field of networking by decoupling the control and forwarding processes through the OpenFlow protocol. The Next Generation SDN is defined by Open Interfaces and full programmability of the data plane. P4 is a domain-specific language that fulfills these requirements and has known wide adoption over recent years from Academia and Industry. This work is an extensive survey of the P4 language covering domains of application, a detailed overview of the language, and future directions

Architecture matérielle logicielle pour l'exécution à latence réduite d'applications de télécommunications émergentes sur centre de données

RÉSUMÉ L’industrie des technologies de l’information et des communications fait face à une demande croissante de services sans fil et Internet omniprésents. Cette demande est alimentée par une explosion du nombre d’appareils mobiles riches en multimédia. Il a été estimé qu’à partir de cette année, 2020, le volume de trafic de données mobiles doublera chaque année pour plusieurs années. En conséquence, il en résulte une augmentation significative des dépenses en capital pour les systèmes construits sur les technologies actuelles de réseau d’accès ra-dio qui sont essentiellement basées sur des architectures avec une structure fixe utilisant des plates-formes propriétaires et des mécanismes de contrôle et de gestion de réseau distribués. D’autre part, pour garantir la qualité de service requise, les sous-systèmes sont dimensionnés en fonction des demandes de pointe. Par conséquent, l’extension du réseau aura un impact considérable sur les dépenses d’exploitation. La recherche proposée vise à développer une architecture matérielle et logicielle adaptée à une grappe d’unités de traitement virtualisée pour les signaux en bande de base d’accès radio en nuagique. Ce type d’architecture de-vra prendre en charge le traitement en temps réel avec des processeurs généralistes sur une plateforme hétérogène. Cela soulève deux défis principaux : la planification des tâches en temps réel et leur exécution d’une manière plus déterministe par rapport aux plates-formes généralistes existantes. Ainsi, les mécanismes d’allocation et de gestion des ressources dans les grappes informatiques doivent être revus. Le deuxième défi est d’obtenir un comporte-ment à faible variance qui implique deux préoccupations majeures : le temps de calcul et le délai de communication. Essentiellement, la variation du temps de calcul est inhérente à tous les processeurs généralistes. Néanmoins, l’infrastructure de communication des grappes informatiques existantes ne fournit aucun soutien pour les communications à faible variance. La recherche proposée est divisée en deux principaux sujets : Le calcul dynamique, l’allocation et la gestion des ressources réseau dans une grappeinformatique (hétérogène) : les algorithmes d’allocation dynamique des ressources et de planification des tâches en temps réel formeront la fonctionnalité de base prise en charge par le plan de contrôle. Afin de répondre aux fortes contraintes en temps réel de cette classe d’applications, une implémentation matérielle parallèle basée sur circuit logique programmable (FPGA) du plan de contrôle est proposée.----------ABSTRACT The Information and Communications Technology industry is facing an increasing demand for ubiquitous wireless and Internet services introduced by an explosion of multimedia-rich mobile devices. It is estimated that starting this year, 2020, the volume of mobile data traÿcs will double every year. Consequently, it results in significant increases of capital expenditures for systems built on the current Radio Access Network technologies, which are essentially based on architectures with a fixed structure (not reconfigurable) using proprietary platforms with distributed network control and management mechanisms. To ensure the required quality of service, subsystems are dimensioned with respect to the peak demands. Therefore, network expansion will considerably impact on operating expenditures. This thesis aims at developing an architecture at both hardware and software levels suitable for a virtualized Baseband Processing Unit pool in Cloud Radio Acces Network in order to support real-time processing in a General Purpose Processor based platform. This raises two main challenges: scheduling tasks in real-time and executing them in a manner that is reduces variance compared to the existing General Purpose Processor based platforms. Real-time tasks from radio air interface in the Cloud Radio Access Network must be scheduled at a finer grain and must be completed within a given timeslot. Thus, mechanisms for resource allocation and management in computing clusters must be revisited. The second challenge is obtaining a behavior with reduced variability that involves two major concerns: computing time and communication delay. Nevertheless, the communication infrastructure of existing computing clusters does not provide any support for low variance communications. The proposed research is divided into the following main subjects:Adaptive computing and network resource allocation and management in (hetero-geneous) computing clusters: The algorithms for dynamic resources allocation and real-time task scheduling will form the core functionality that the control plane will support. In order to meet the hard real-time constraints of that class of applications, a parallel Field Programable Gate Array based hardware implementation of the control plane is proposed

A Survey of FPGA Optimization Methods for Data Center Energy Efficiency

This article provides a survey of academic literature about field programmable gate array (FPGA) and their utilization for energy efficiency acceleration in data centers. The goal is to critically present the existing FPGA energy optimization techniques and discuss how they can be applied to such systems. To do so, the article explores current energy trends and their projection to the future with particular attention to the requirements set out by the European Code of Conduct for Data Center Energy Efficiency. The article then proposes a complete analysis of over ten years of research in energy optimization techniques, classifying them by purpose, method of application, and impacts on the sources of consumption. Finally, we conclude with the challenges and possible innovations we expect for this sector.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computin

A Survey on Data Plane Programming with P4: Fundamentals, Advances, and Applied Research

With traditional networking, users can configure control plane protocols to match the specific network configuration, but without the ability to fundamentally change the underlying algorithms. With SDN, the users may provide their own control plane, that can control network devices through their data plane APIs. Programmable data planes allow users to define their own data plane algorithms for network devices including appropriate data plane APIs which may be leveraged by user-defined SDN control. Thus, programmable data planes and SDN offer great flexibility for network customization, be it for specialized, commercial appliances, e.g., in 5G or data center networks, or for rapid prototyping in industrial and academic research. Programming protocol-independent packet processors (P4) has emerged as the currently most widespread abstraction, programming language, and concept for data plane programming. It is developed and standardized by an open community and it is supported by various software and hardware platforms. In this paper, we survey the literature from 2015 to 2020 on data plane programming with P4. Our survey covers 497 references of which 367 are scientific publications. We organize our work into two parts. In the first part, we give an overview of data plane programming models, the programming language, architectures, compilers, targets, and data plane APIs. We also consider research efforts to advance P4 technology. In the second part, we analyze a large body of literature considering P4-based applied research. We categorize 241 research papers into different application domains, summarize their contributions, and extract prototypes, target platforms, and source code availability.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials (COMS) on 2021-01-2