Integrated NFV/SDN Architectures: A Systematic Literature Review

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) are new paradigms in the move towards open software and network hardware. While NFV aims to virtualize network functions and deploy them into general purpose hardware, SDN makes networks programmable by separating the control and data planes. NFV and SDN are complementary technologies capable of providing one network solution. SDN can provide connectivity between Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) in a flexible and automated way, whereas NFV can use SDN as part of a service function chain. There are many studies designing NFV/SDN architectures in different environments. Researchers have been trying to address reliability, performance, and scalability problems using different architectural designs. This Systematic Literature Review (SLR) focuses on integrated NFV/SDN architectures, with the following goals: i) to investigate and provide an in-depth review of the state-of-the-art of NFV/SDN architectures, ii) to synthesize their architectural designs, and iii) to identify areas for further improvements. Broadly, this SLR will encourage researchers to advance the current stage of development (i.e., the state-of-the-practice) of integrated NFV/SDN architectures, and shed some light on future research efforts and the challenges faced.Comment: Accepted for publication at ACM Computing Survey

All One Needs to Know about Fog Computing and Related Edge Computing Paradigms: A Complete Survey

With the Internet of Things (IoT) becoming part of our daily life and our environment, we expect rapid growth in the number of connected devices. IoT is expected to connect billions of devices and humans to bring promising advantages for us. With this growth, fog computing, along with its related edge computing paradigms, such as multi-access edge computing (MEC) and cloudlet, are seen as promising solutions for handling the large volume of security-critical and time-sensitive data that is being produced by the IoT. In this paper, we first provide a tutorial on fog computing and its related computing paradigms, including their similarities and differences. Next, we provide a taxonomy of research topics in fog computing, and through a comprehensive survey, we summarize and categorize the efforts on fog computing and its related computing paradigms. Finally, we provide challenges and future directions for research in fog computing.Comment: 48 pages, 7 tables, 11 figures, 450 references. The data (categories and features/objectives of the papers) of this survey are now available publicly. Accepted by Elsevier Journal of Systems Architectur

Five Driving Forces of Multi-Access Edge Computing

The emergence of Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) technology aims at extending cloud computing capabilities to the edge of the wireless access networks. MEC provides real-time, high-bandwidth, low-latency access to radio network resources, allowing operators to open their networks to a new ecosystem and value chain. Moreover, it will provide a new insight to the design of future 5th Generation (5G) wireless systems. This paper describes five key technologies, including Network Function Vitalization (NFV), Software Defined Networking (SDN), Network Slicing, Information Centric Networking (ICN) and Internet of Things (IoT), that intensify the widespread of MEC and its adoption. Our goal is to provide the associativity between MEC and these five driving technologies in 5G context while identifying the open challenges, future directions, and tangible integration paths.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Communications Magazin

A Comprehensive Survey of Interface Protocols for Software Defined Networks

Software Defined Networks has seen tremendous growth and deployment in different types of networks. Compared to traditional networks it decouples the control logic from network layer devices, and centralizes it for efficient traffic forwarding and flow management across the domain. This multi-layered architecture has data forwarding devices at the bottom in data plane, which are programmed by controllers in the control plane. The high level application or management plane interacts with control layer to program the whole network and enforce different policies. The interaction among these layers is done through interfaces which work as communication/programming protocols. In this survey, we present a comprehensive study of such interfaces available for southbound, northbound, and east/westbound communication. We have classified each type into different categories based on their properties and capabilities. Virtualization of networks devices is a common practice in Software Defined Networks. This paper also analyzes interface solution which work with different virtualization schemes. In addition, the paper highlights a number of short term and long term research challenges and open issues related to SDN interfaces.Comment: Version 0.51. An advanced version is under revie

A ReRAM Physically Unclonable Function (ReRAM PUF)-based Approach to Enhance Authentication Security in Software Defined Wireless Networks

The exponentially increasing number of ubiquitous wireless devices connected to the Internet in Internet of Things (IoT) networks highlights the need for a new paradigm of data flow management in such large-scale networks under software defined wireless networking (SDWN). The limited power and computation capability available at IoT devices as well as the centralized management and decision-making approach in SDWN introduce a whole new set of security threats to the networks. In particular, the authentication mechanism between the controllers and the forwarding devices in SDWNs is a key challenge from both secrecy and integrity aspects. Conventional authentication protocols based on public key infrastructure (PKI) are no longer sufficient for these networks considering the large-scale and heterogeneity nature of the networks as well as their deployment cost, and security vulnerabilities due to key distribution and storage. We propose a novel security protocol based on physical unclonable functions (PUFs) known as hardware security primitives to enhance the authentication security in SDWNs. In this approach, digital PUFs are developed using the inherent randomness of the nanomaterials of Resistive Random Access Memory (ReRAM) that are embedded in most IoT devices to enable a secure authentication and access control in these networks. These PUFs are developed based on a novel approach of multi-states, in which the natural drifts due to the physical variations in the environment are predicted to reduce the potential errors in challenge-response pairs of PUFs being tested in different situations. We also proposed a PUF-based PKI protocol to secure the controller in SDWNs. The performance of the developed ReRAM-based PUFs are evaluated in the experimental results.Comment: 16 pages, 10 figures, submitted to Springer International Journal of Wireless Information Network

Initial Service Provider DevOps concept, capabilities and proposed tools

This report presents a first sketch of the Service Provider DevOps concept including four major management processes to support the roles of both service and VNF developers as well as the operator in a more agile manner. The sketch is based on lessons learned from a study of management and operational practices in the industry and recent related work with respect to management of SDN and cloud. Finally, the report identifies requirements for realizing SP-DevOps within an combined cloud and transport network environment as outlined by the UNIFY NFV architecture.Comment: Deliverable D4.1 of the EU FP7 UNIFY project (ICT-619609)-"Initial requirements for the SP-DevOps concept, Universal Node capabilities and proposed tools". Original Deliverable published at https://www.fp7-unify.eu/files/fp7-unify-eu-docs/Results/Deliverables/UNIFY_D4.1%20Initial%20requirements%20for%20the%20SP-DevOps%20concept,%20universal%20node%20capabilities%20and%20proposed%20tools.pd

A Survey on Software-Defined VANETs: Benefits, Challenges, and Future Directions

The evolving of Fifth Generation (5G) networks isbecoming more readily available as a major driver of the growthof new applications and business models. Vehicular Ad hocNetworks (VANETs) and Software Defined Networking (SDN)represent the key enablers of 5G technology with the developmentof next generation intelligent vehicular networks and applica-tions. In recent years, researchers have focused on the integrationof SDN and VANET, and look at different topics related to thearchitecture, the benefits of software-defined VANET servicesand the new functionalities to adapt them. However, securityand robustness of the complete architecture is still questionableand have been largely negleted. Moreover, the deployment andintegration of novel entities and several architectural componentsdrive new security threats and vulnerabilities.In this paper, first we survey the state-of-the-art SDN basedVehicular ad-hoc Network (SDVN) architectures for their net-working infrastructure design, functionalities, benefits, and chal-lenges. Then we discuss these SDVN architectures against majorsecurity threats that violate the key security services such asavailability, confidentiality, authentication, and data integrity.We also propose different countermeasures to these threats.Finally, we discuss the lessons learned with the directions offuture research work towards provisioning stringent security andprivacy solutions in future SDVN architectures. To the best of ourknowledge, this is the first comprehensive work that presents sucha survey and analysis on SDVNs in the era of future generationnetworks (e.g., 5G, and Information centric networking) andapplications (e.g., intelligent transportation system, and IoT-enabled advertising in VANETs).Comment: 17 pages, 2 figure

Software Defined Security Service Provisioning Framework for Internet of Things

Programmable management framework have paved the way for managing devices in the network. Lately, emerging paradigm of Software Defined Networking (SDN) have revolutionized programmable networks. Designers of networking applications i.e. Internet of things (IoT) have started investigating potentials of SDN paradigm in improving network management. IoT envision interconnecting various embedded devices surrounding our environment with IP to enable internet connectivity. Unlike traditional network architectures, IoT are characterized by constraint in resources and heterogeneous inter connectivity of wireless and wired medium. Therefore, unique challenges for managing IoT are raised which are discussed in this paper. Ubiquity of IoT have raised unique security challenges in IoT which is one of the aspect of management framework for IoT. In this paper, security threats and requirements are summarized in IoT extracted from the state of the art efforts in investigating security challenges of IoT. Also, SDN based security service provisioning framework for IoT is proposed.Comment: 15 pages, 18 figure

Software-Defined Network for End-to-end Networked Science at the Exascale

Domain science applications and workflow processes are currently forced to view the network as an opaque infrastructure into which they inject data and hope that it emerges at the destination with an acceptable Quality of Experience. There is little ability for applications to interact with the network to exchange information, negotiate performance parameters, discover expected performance metrics, or receive status/troubleshooting information in real time. The work presented here is motivated by a vision for a new smart network and smart application ecosystem that will provide a more deterministic and interactive environment for domain science workflows. The Software-Defined Network for End-to-end Networked Science at Exascale (SENSE) system includes a model-based architecture, implementation, and deployment which enables automated end-to-end network service instantiation across administrative domains. An intent based interface allows applications to express their high-level service requirements, an intelligent orchestrator and resource control systems allow for custom tailoring of scalability and real-time responsiveness based on individual application and infrastructure operator requirements. This allows the science applications to manage the network as a first-class schedulable resource as is the current practice for instruments, compute, and storage systems. Deployment and experiments on production networks and testbeds have validated SENSE functions and performance. Emulation based testing verified the scalability needed to support research and education infrastructures. Key contributions of this work include an architecture definition, reference implementation, and deployment. This provides the basis for further innovation of smart network services to accelerate scientific discovery in the era of big data, cloud computing, machine learning and artificial intelligence

Energy and Information Management of Electric Vehicular Network: A Survey

The connected vehicle paradigm empowers vehicles with the capability to communicate with neighboring vehicles and infrastructure, shifting the role of vehicles from a transportation tool to an intelligent service platform. Meanwhile, the transportation electrification pushes forward the electric vehicle (EV) commercialization to reduce the greenhouse gas emission by petroleum combustion. The unstoppable trends of connected vehicle and EVs transform the traditional vehicular system to an electric vehicular network (EVN), a clean, mobile, and safe system. However, due to the mobility and heterogeneity of the EVN, improper management of the network could result in charging overload and data congestion. Thus, energy and information management of the EVN should be carefully studied. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on the deployment and management of EVN considering all three aspects of energy flow, data communication, and computation. We first introduce the management framework of EVN. Then, research works on the EV aggregator (AG) deployment are reviewed to provide energy and information infrastructure for the EVN. Based on the deployed AGs, we present the research work review on EV scheduling that includes both charging and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) scheduling. Moreover, related works on information communication and computing are surveyed under each scenario. Finally, we discuss open research issues in the EVN