Deliverable DJRA1.2. Solutions and protocols proposal for the network control, management and monitoring in a virtualized network context

This deliverable presents several research proposals for the FEDERICA network, in different subjects, such as monitoring, routing, signalling, resource discovery, and isolation. For each topic one or more possible solutions are elaborated, explaining the background, functioning and the implications of the proposed solutions.This deliverable goes further on the research aspects within FEDERICA. First of all the architecture of the control plane for the FEDERICA infrastructure will be defined. Several possibilities could be implemented, using the basic FEDERICA infrastructure as a starting point. The focus on this document is the intra-domain aspects of the control plane and their properties. Also some inter-domain aspects are addressed. The main objective of this deliverable is to lay great stress on creating and implementing the prototype/tool for the FEDERICA slice-oriented control system using the appropriate framework. This deliverable goes deeply into the definition of the containers between entities and their syntax, preparing this tool for the future implementation of any kind of algorithm related to the control plane, for both to apply UPB policies or to configure it by hand. We opt for an open solution despite the real time limitations that we could have (for instance, opening web services connexions or applying fast recovering mechanisms). The application being developed is the central element in the control plane, and additional features must be added to this application. This control plane, from the functionality point of view, is composed by several procedures that provide a reliable application and that include some mechanisms or algorithms to be able to discover and assign resources to the user. To achieve this, several topics must be researched in order to propose new protocols for the virtual infrastructure. The topics and necessary features covered in this document include resource discovery, resource allocation, signalling, routing, isolation and monitoring. All these topics must be researched in order to find a good solution for the FEDERICA network. Some of these algorithms have started to be analyzed and will be expanded in the next deliverable. Current standardization and existing solutions have been investigated in order to find a good solution for FEDERICA. Resource discovery is an important issue within the FEDERICA network, as manual resource discovery is no option, due to scalability requirement. Furthermore, no standardization exists, so knowledge must be obtained from related work. Ideally, the proposed solutions for these topics should not only be adequate specifically for this infrastructure, but could also be applied to other virtualized networks.Postprint (published version

Algorithms for advance bandwidth reservation in media production networks

Media production generally requires many geographically distributed actors (e.g., production houses, broadcasters, advertisers) to exchange huge amounts of raw video and audio data. Traditional distribution techniques, such as dedicated point-to-point optical links, are highly inefficient in terms of installation time and cost. To improve efficiency, shared media production networks that connect all involved actors over a large geographical area, are currently being deployed. The traffic in such networks is often predictable, as the timing and bandwidth requirements of data transfers are generally known hours or even days in advance. As such, the use of advance bandwidth reservation (AR) can greatly increase resource utilization and cost efficiency. In this paper, we propose an Integer Linear Programming formulation of the bandwidth scheduling problem, which takes into account the specific characteristics of media production networks, is presented. Two novel optimization algorithms based on this model are thoroughly evaluated and compared by means of in-depth simulation results

Semantic validation of affinity constrained service function chain requests

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has been proposed as a paradigm to increase the cost-efficiency, flexibility and innovation in network service provisioning. By leveraging IT virtualization techniques in combination with programmable networks, NFV is able to decouple network functionality from the physical devices on which they are deployed. This opens up new business opportunities for both Infrastructure Providers (InPs) as well as Service Providers (SPs), where the SP can request to deploy a chain of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) on top of which its service can run. However, current NFV approaches lack the possibility for SPs to define location requirements and constraints on the mapping of virtual functions and paths onto physical hosts and links. Nevertheless, many scenarios can be envisioned in which the SP would like to attach placement constraints for efficiency, resilience, legislative, privacy and economic reasons. Therefore, we propose a set of affinity and anti-affinity constraints, which can be used by SPs to define such placement restrictions. This newfound ability to add constraints to Service Function Chain (SFC) requests also introduces an additional risk that SFCs with conflicting constraints are requested or automatically generated. Therefore, a framework is proposed that allows the InP to check the validity of a set of constraints and provide feedback to the SP. To achieve this, the SFC request and relevant information on the physical topology are modeled as an ontology of which the consistency can be checked using a semantic reasoner. Enabling semantic validation of SFC requests, eliminates inconsistent SFCs requests from being transferred to the embedding algorithm.Peer Reviewe