On the Fly Orchestration of Unikernels: Tuning and Performance Evaluation of Virtual Infrastructure Managers

Network operators are facing significant challenges meeting the demand for more bandwidth, agile infrastructures, innovative services, while keeping costs low. Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Cloud Computing are emerging as key trends of 5G network architectures, providing flexibility, fast instantiation times, support of Commercial Off The Shelf hardware and significant cost savings. NFV leverages Cloud Computing principles to move the data-plane network functions from expensive, closed and proprietary hardware to the so-called Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). In this paper we deal with the management of virtual computing resources (Unikernels) for the execution of VNFs. This functionality is performed by the Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM) in the NFV MANagement and Orchestration (MANO) reference architecture. We discuss the instantiation process of virtual resources and propose a generic reference model, starting from the analysis of three open source VIMs, namely OpenStack, Nomad and OpenVIM. We improve the aforementioned VIMs introducing the support for special-purpose Unikernels and aiming at reducing the duration of the instantiation process. We evaluate some performance aspects of the VIMs, considering both stock and tuned versions. The VIM extensions and performance evaluation tools are available under a liberal open source licence

Secure Virtualization and Multicore Platforms State-of-the-Art report

SVaM

DeSyRe: on-Demand System Reliability

The DeSyRe project builds on-demand adaptive and reliable Systems-on-Chips (SoCs). As fabrication technology scales down, chips are becoming less reliable, thereby incurring increased power and performance costs for fault tolerance. To make matters worse, power density is becoming a significant limiting factor in SoC design, in general. In the face of such changes in the technological landscape, current solutions for fault tolerance are expected to introduce excessive overheads in future systems. Moreover, attempting to design and manufacture a totally defect and fault-free system, would impact heavily, even prohibitively, the design, manufacturing, and testing costs, as well as the system performance and power consumption. In this context, DeSyRe delivers a new generation of systems that are reliable by design at well-balanced power, performance, and design costs. In our attempt to reduce the overheads of fault-tolerance, only a small fraction of the chip is built to be fault-free. This fault-free part is then employed to manage the remaining fault-prone resources of the SoC. The DeSyRe framework is applied to two medical systems with high safety requirements (measured using the IEC 61508 functional safety standard) and tight power and performance constraints

Will SDN be part of 5G?

For many, this is no longer a valid question and the case is considered settled with SDN/NFV (Software Defined Networking/Network Function Virtualization) providing the inevitable innovation enablers solving many outstanding management issues regarding 5G. However, given the monumental task of softwarization of radio access network (RAN) while 5G is just around the corner and some companies have started unveiling their 5G equipment already, the concern is very realistic that we may only see some point solutions involving SDN technology instead of a fully SDN-enabled RAN. This survey paper identifies all important obstacles in the way and looks at the state of the art of the relevant solutions. This survey is different from the previous surveys on SDN-based RAN as it focuses on the salient problems and discusses solutions proposed within and outside SDN literature. Our main focus is on fronthaul, backward compatibility, supposedly disruptive nature of SDN deployment, business cases and monetization of SDN related upgrades, latency of general purpose processors (GPP), and additional security vulnerabilities, softwarization brings along to the RAN. We have also provided a summary of the architectural developments in SDN-based RAN landscape as not all work can be covered under the focused issues. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on the state of the art of SDN-based RAN and clearly points out the gaps in the technology.Comment: 33 pages, 10 figure

MiniCPS: A toolkit for security research on CPS Networks

In recent years, tremendous effort has been spent to modernizing communication infrastructure in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) such as Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and related Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems. While a great amount of research has been conducted on network security of office and home networks, recently the security of CPS and related systems has gained a lot of attention. Unfortunately, real-world CPS are often not open to security researchers, and as a result very few reference systems and topologies are available. In this work, we present MiniCPS, a CPS simulation toolbox intended to alleviate this problem. The goal of MiniCPS is to create an extensible, reproducible research environment targeted to communications and physical-layer interactions in CPS. MiniCPS builds on Mininet to provide lightweight real-time network emulation, and extends Mininet with tools to simulate typical CPS components such as programmable logic controllers, which use industrial protocols (Ethernet/IP, Modbus/TCP). In addition, MiniCPS defines a simple API to enable physical-layer interaction simulation. In this work, we demonstrate applications of MiniCPS in two example scenarios, and show how MiniCPS can be used to develop attacks and defenses that are directly applicable to real systems.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, 1 code listin

High-performance and Scalable Software-based NVMe Virtualization Mechanism with I/O Queues Passthrough

NVMe(Non-Volatile Memory Express) is an industry standard for solid-state drives (SSDs) that has been widely adopted in data centers. NVMe virtualization is crucial in cloud computing as it allows for virtualized NVMe devices to be used by virtual machines (VMs), thereby improving the utilization of storage resources. However, traditional software-based solutions have flexibility benefits but often come at the cost of performance degradation or high CPU overhead. On the other hand, hardware-assisted solutions offer high performance and low CPU usage, but their adoption is often limited by the need for special hardware support or the requirement for new hardware development. In this paper, we propose LightIOV, a novel software-based NVMe virtualization mechanism that achieves high performance and scalability without consuming valuable CPU resources and without requiring special hardware support. LightIOV can support thousands of VMs on each server. The key idea behind LightIOV is NVMe hardware I/O queues passthrough, which enables VMs to directly access I/O queues of NVMe devices, thus eliminating virtualization overhead and providing near-native performance. Results from our experiments show that LightIOV can provide comparable performance to VFIO, with an IOPS of 97.6%-100.2% of VFIO. Furthermore, in high-density VMs environments, LightIOV achieves 31.4% lower latency than SPDK-Vhost when running 200 VMs, and an improvement of 27.1% in OPS performance in real-world applications