Building Programmable Wireless Networks: An Architectural Survey

In recent times, there have been a lot of efforts for improving the ossified Internet architecture in a bid to sustain unstinted growth and innovation. A major reason for the perceived architectural ossification is the lack of ability to program the network as a system. This situation has resulted partly from historical decisions in the original Internet design which emphasized decentralized network operations through co-located data and control planes on each network device. The situation for wireless networks is no different resulting in a lot of complexity and a plethora of largely incompatible wireless technologies. The emergence of "programmable wireless networks", that allow greater flexibility, ease of management and configurability, is a step in the right direction to overcome the aforementioned shortcomings of the wireless networks. In this paper, we provide a broad overview of the architectures proposed in literature for building programmable wireless networks focusing primarily on three popular techniques, i.e., software defined networks, cognitive radio networks, and virtualized networks. This survey is a self-contained tutorial on these techniques and its applications. We also discuss the opportunities and challenges in building next-generation programmable wireless networks and identify open research issues and future research directions.Comment: 19 page

Active networks: an evolution of the internet

Active Networks can be seen as an evolution of the classical model of packet-switched networks. The traditional and ”passive” network model is based on a static definition of the network node behaviour. Active Networks propose an “active” model where the intermediate nodes (switches and routers) can load and execute user code contained in the data units (packets). Active Networks are a programmable network model, where bandwidth and computation are both considered shared network resources. This approach opens up new interesting research fields. This paper gives a short introduction of Active Networks, discusses the advantages they introduce and presents the research advances in this field

NFV Based Gateways for Virtualized Wireless Sensors Networks: A Case Study

Virtualization enables the sharing of a same wireless sensor network (WSN) by multiple applications. However, in heterogeneous environments, virtualized wireless sensor networks (VWSN) raises new challenges such as the need for on-the-fly, dynamic, elastic and scalable provisioning of gateways. Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is an emerging paradigm that can certainly aid in tackling these new challenges. It leverages standard virtualization technology to consolidate special-purpose network elements on top of commodity hardware. This article presents a case study on NFV based gateways for VWSNs. In the study, a VWSN gateway provider, operates and manages an NFV based infrastructure. We use two different brands of wireless sensors. The NFV infrastructure makes possible the dynamic, elastic and scalable deployment of gateway modules in this heterogeneous VWSN environment. The prototype built with Openstack as platform is described

GRIDKIT: Pluggable overlay networks for Grid computing

A `second generation' approach to the provision of Grid middleware is now emerging which is built on service-oriented architecture and web services standards and technologies. However, advanced Grid applications have significant demands that are not addressed by present-day web services platforms. As one prime example, current platforms do not support the rich diversity of communication `interaction types' that are demanded by advanced applications (e.g. publish-subscribe, media streaming, peer-to-peer interaction). In the paper we describe the Gridkit middleware which augments the basic service-oriented architecture to address this particular deficiency. We particularly focus on the communications infrastructure support required to support multiple interaction types in a unified, principled and extensible manner-which we present in terms of the novel concept of pluggable overlay networks

DISCO: Distributed Multi-domain SDN Controllers

Modern multi-domain networks now span over datacenter networks, enterprise networks, customer sites and mobile entities. Such networks are critical and, thus, must be resilient, scalable and easily extensible. The emergence of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) protocols, which enables to decouple the data plane from the control plane and dynamically program the network, opens up new ways to architect such networks. In this paper, we propose DISCO, an open and extensible DIstributed SDN COntrol plane able to cope with the distributed and heterogeneous nature of modern overlay networks and wide area networks. DISCO controllers manage their own network domain and communicate with each others to provide end-to-end network services. This communication is based on a unique lightweight and highly manageable control channel used by agents to self-adaptively share aggregated network-wide information. We implemented DISCO on top of the Floodlight OpenFlow controller and the AMQP protocol. We demonstrated how DISCO's control plane dynamically adapts to heterogeneous network topologies while being resilient enough to survive to disruptions and attacks and providing classic functionalities such as end-point migration and network-wide traffic engineering. The experimentation results we present are organized around three use cases: inter-domain topology disruption, end-to-end priority service request and virtual machine migration