Orchestrating datacenters and networks to facilitate the telecom cloud

In the Internet of services, information technology (IT) infrastructure providers play a critical role in making the services accessible to end-users. IT infrastructure providers host platforms and services in their datacenters (DCs). The cloud initiative has been accompanied by the introduction of new computing paradigms, such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS), which have dramatically reduced the time and costs required to develop and deploy a service. However, transport networks become crucial to make services accessible to the user and to operate DCs. Transport networks are currently configured with big static fat pipes based on capacity over-provisioning aiming at guaranteeing traffic demand and other parameters committed in Service Level Agreement (SLA) contracts. Notwithstanding, such over-dimensioning adds high operational costs for DC operators and service providers. Therefore, new mechanisms to provide reconfiguration and adaptability of the transport network to reduce the amount of over-provisioned bandwidth are required. Although cloud-ready transport network architecture was introduced to handle the dynamic cloud and network interaction and Elastic Optical Networks (EONs) can facilitate elastic network operations, orchestration between the cloud and the interconnection network is eventually required to coordinate resources in both strata in a coherent manner. In addition, the explosion of Internet Protocol (IP)-based services requiring not only dynamic cloud and network interaction, but also additional service-specific SLA parameters and the expected benefits of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), open the opportunity to telecom operators to exploit that cloud-ready transport network and their current infrastructure, to efficiently satisfy network requirements from the services. In the telecom cloud, a pay-per-use model can be offered to support services requiring resources from the transport network and its infrastructure. In this thesis, we study connectivity requirements from representative cloud-based services and explore connectivity models, architectures and orchestration schemes to satisfy them aiming at facilitating the telecom cloud. The main objective of this thesis is demonstrating, by means of analytical models and simulation, the viability of orchestrating DCs and networks to facilitate the telecom cloud. To achieve the main goal we first study the connectivity requirements for DC interconnection and services on a number of scenarios that require connectivity from the transport network. Specifically, we focus on studying DC federations, live-TV distribution, and 5G mobile networks. Next, we study different connectivity schemes, algorithms, and architectures aiming at satisfying those connectivity requirements. In particular, we study polling-based models for dynamic inter-DC connectivity and propose a novel notification-based connectivity scheme where inter-DC connectivity can be delegated to the network operator. Additionally, we explore virtual network topology provisioning models to support services that require service-specific SLA parameters on the telecom cloud. Finally, we focus on studying DC and network orchestration to fulfill simultaneously SLA contracts for a set of customers requiring connectivity from the transport network.En la Internet de los servicios, los proveedores de recursos relacionados con tecnologías de la información juegan un papel crítico haciéndolos accesibles a los usuarios como servicios. Dichos proveedores, hospedan plataformas y servicios en centros de datos. La oferta plataformas y servicios en la nube ha introducido nuevos paradigmas de computación tales como ofrecer la infraestructura como servicio, conocido como IaaS de sus siglas en inglés, y el software como servicio, SaaS. La disponibilidad de recursos en la nube, ha contribuido a la reducción de tiempos y costes para desarrollar y desplegar un servicio. Sin embargo, para permitir el acceso de los usuarios a los servicios así como para operar los centros de datos, las redes de transporte resultan imprescindibles. Actualmente, las redes de transporte están configuradas con conexiones estáticas y su capacidad sobredimensionada para garantizar la demanda de tráfico así como los distintos parámetros relacionados con el nivel de servicio acordado. No obstante, debido a que el exceso de capacidad en las conexiones se traduce en un elevado coste tanto para los operadores de los centros de datos como para los proveedores de servicios, son necesarios nuevos mecanismos que permitan adaptar y reconfigurar la red de forma eficiente de acuerdo a las nuevas necesidades de los servicios a los que dan soporte. A pesar de la introducción de arquitecturas que permiten la gestión de redes de transporte y su interacción con los servicios en la nube de forma dinámica, y de la irrupción de las redes ópticas elásticas, la orquestación entre la nube y la red es necesaria para coordinar de forma coherente los recursos en los distintos estratos. Además, la explosión de servicios basados el Protocolo de Internet, IP, que requieren tanto interacción dinámica con la red como parámetros particulares en los niveles de servicio además de los habituales, así como los beneficios que se esperan de la virtualización de funciones de red, representan una oportunidad para los operadores de red para explotar sus recursos y su infraestructura. La nube de operador permite ofrecer recursos del operador de red a los servicios, de forma similar a un sistema basado en pago por uso. En esta Tesis, se estudian requisitos de conectividad de servicios basados en la nube y se exploran modelos de conectividad, arquitecturas y modelos de orquestación que contribuyan a la realización de la nube de operador. El objetivo principal de esta Tesis es demostrar la viabilidad de la orquestación de centros de datos y redes para facilitar la nube de operador, mediante modelos analíticos y simulaciones. Con el fin de cumplir dicho objetivo, primero estudiamos los requisitos de conectividad para la interconexión de centros de datos y servicios en distintos escenarios que requieren conectividad en la red de transporte. En particular, nos centramos en el estudio de escenarios basados en federaciones de centros de datos, distribución de televisión en directo y la evolución de las redes móviles hacia 5G. A continuación, estudiamos distintos modelos de conectividad, algoritmos y arquitecturas para satisfacer los requisitos de conectividad. Estudiamos modelos de conectividad basados en sondeos para la interconexión de centros de datos y proponemos un modelo basado en notificaciones donde la gestión de la conectividad entre centros de datos se delega al operador de red. Estudiamos la provisión de redes virtuales para soportar en la nube de operador servicios que requieren parámetros específicos en los acuerdos de nivel de servicio además de los habituales. Finalmente, nos centramos en el estudio de la orquestación de centros de datos y redes con el objetivo de satisfacer de forma simultánea requisitos para distintos servicios.Postprint (published version

On Integrating Failure Localization with Survivable Design

In this thesis, I proposed a novel framework of all-optical failure restoration which jointly determines network monitoring plane and spare capacity allocation in the presence of either static or dynamic traffic. The proposed framework aims to enable a general shared protection scheme to achieve near optimal capacity efficiency as in Failure Dependent Protection(FDP) while subject to an ultra-fast, all-optical, and deterministic failure restoration process. Simply put, Local Unambiguous Failure Localization(L-UFL) and FDP are the two building blocks for the proposed restoration framework. Under L-UFL, by properly allocating a set of Monitoring Trails (m-trails), a set of nodes can unambiguously identify every possible Shared Risk Link Group (SRLG) failure merely based on its locally collected Loss of Light(LOL) signals. Two heuristics are proposed to solve L-UFL, one of which exclusively deploys Supervisory Lightpaths (S-LPs) while the other jointly considers S-LPs and Working Lightpaths (W-LPs) for suppressing monitoring resource consumption. Thanks to the ``Enhanced Min Wavelength Max Information principle'', an entropy based utility function, m-trail global-sharing and other techniques, the proposed heuristics exhibit satisfactory performance in minimizing the number of m-trails, Wavelength Channel(WL) consumption and the running time of the algorithm. Based on the heuristics for L-UFL, two algorithms, namely MPJD and DJH, are proposed for the novel signaling-free restoration framework to deal with static and dynamic traffic respectively. MPJD is developed to determine the Protection Lightpaths (P-LPs) and m-trails given the pre-computed W-LPs while DJH jointly implements a generic dynamic survivable routing scheme based on FDP with an m-trail deployment scheme. For both algorithms, m-trail deployment is guided by the Necessary Monitoring Requirement (NMR) defined at each node for achieving signaling-free restoration. Extensive simulation is conducted to verify the performance of the proposed heuristics in terms of WL consumption, number of m-trails, monitoring requirement, blocking probability and running time. In conclusion, the proposed restoration framework can achieve all-optical and signaling-free restoration with the help of L-UFL, while maintaining high capacity efficiency as in FDP based survivable routing. The proposed heuristics achieve satisfactory performance as verified by the simulation results

Differentiated quality-of-recovery and quality-of-protection in survivable WDM mesh networks

In the modern telecommunication business, there is a need to provide different Quality-of-Recovery (QoR) and Quality-of-Protection (QoP) classes in order to accommodate as many customers as possible, and to optimize the protection capacity cost. Prevalent protection methods to provide specific QoS related to protection are based on pre-defined shape protection structures (topologies), e.g., p -cycles and p -trees. Although some of these protection patterns are known to provide a good trade-off among the different protection parameters, their shapes can limit their deployment in some specific network conditions, e.g., a constrained link spare capacity budget and traffic distribution. In this thesis, we propose to re-think the design process of protection schemes in survivable WDM networks by adopting a hew design approach where the shapes of the protection structures are decided based on the targeted QoR and QoP guarantees, and not the reverse. We focus on the degree of pre-configuration of the protection topologies, and use fully and partially pre-cross connected p -structures, and dynamically cross connected p -structures. In QoR differentiation, we develop different approaches for pre-configuring the protection capacity in order to strike different balances between the protection cost and the availability requirements in the network; while in the QoP differentiation, we focus on the shaping of the protection structures to provide different grades of protection including single and dual-link failure protection. The new research directions proposed and developed in this thesis are intended to help network operators to effectively support different Quality-of-Recovery and Quality-of-Protection classes. All new ideas have been translated into mathematical models for which we propose practical and efficient design methods in order to optimize the inherent cost to the different designs of protection schemes. Furthermore, we establish a quantitative relation between the degree of pre-configuration of the protection structures and their costs in terms of protection capacity. Our most significant contributions are the design and development of Pre-Configured Protection Structure (p-structure) and Pre-Configured Protection Extended-Tree (p -etree) based schemes. Thanks to the column generation modeling and solution approaches, we propose a new design approach of protection schemes where we deploy just enough protection to provide different quality of recovery and protection classe

Disaster Resilient Optical Core Networks

During the past few years, the number of catastrophic disasters has increased and its impact sometimes incapacitates the infrastructures within a region. The communication network infrastructure is one of the affected systems during these events. Thus, building a resilient network backbone is essential due to the big role of networks during disaster recovery operations. In this thesis, the research efforts in building a disaster-resilient network are reviewed and open issues related to building disaster-resilient networks are discussed. Large size disasters not necessarily impact the communication networks, but instead it can stimulate events that cause network performance degradation. In this regard, two open challenges that arise after disasters are considered one is the short-term capacity exhaustion and the second is the power outage. First, the post-disaster traffic floods phenomena is considered. The impact of the traffic floods on the optical core network performance is studied. Five mitigation approaches are proposed to serve these floods and minimise the incurred blocking. The proposed approaches explore different technologies such as excess or overprovisioned capacity exploitation, traffic filtering, protection paths rerouting, rerouting all traffic and finally using the degrees of freedom offered by differentiated services. The mitigation approaches succeeded in reducing the disaster induced traffic blocking. Second, advance reservation provisioning in an energy-efficient approach is developed. Four scenarios are considered to minimise power consumption. The scenarios exploit the flexibility provided by the sliding-window advance reservation requests. This flexibility is studied through scheduling and rescheduling scenarios. The proposed scenarios succeeded in minimising the consumed power. Third, the sliding-window flexibility is exploited for the objective of minimising network blocking during post-disaster traffic floods. The scheduling and rescheduling scenarios are extended to overcome the capacity exhaustion and improve the network blocking. The proposed schemes minimised the incurred blocking during traffic floods by exploiting sliding window. Fourth, building blackout resilient networks is proposed. The network performance during power outages is evaluated. A remedy approach is suggested for maximising network lifetime during blackouts. The approach attempts to reduce the required backup power supply while minimising network outages due to limited energy production. The results show that the mitigation approach succeeds in keeping the network alive during a blackout while minimising the required backup power

Optical Grid Network Dimensioning, Provisioning, and Job Scheduling

An optical grid network reliably provides high speed communications. It consists of grid resources (e.g., computing and data servers) and huge-data paths that are connected to geographically dispersed resources and users. One of the important issues is dimensioning optical grid networks, i.e., to determine the link bandwidth utilization and amount of server resources, and finding the location of servers. Another issue is the provisioning of the job requests (maximization of services) on the capacitated networks, also referred to as Grade of Service (GoS). Additionally, job scheduling on the servers has also an important impact on the utilization of computing and network resources. Dimensioning optical grid network is based on Anycast Routing and Wavelength Assignment (ACRWA) with the objective of minimizing (min-ACRWA) the resources. The objective of GoS is maximizing the number of job requests (max-ACRWA) under the limited resources. Given that users of such optical grid networks in general do not care about the exact physical locations of the server resources, a degree of freedom arises in choosing for each of their requests the most appropriate server location. We will exploit this anycast routing principle -- i.e., the source of the traffic is given, but the destination can be chosen rather freely. To provide resilience, traffic may be relocated to alternate destinations in case of network/server failures. This thesis investigates dimensioning optical grids networks and task scheduling. In the first part, we present the link capacity dimensioning through scalable exact Integer Linear Programming (ILP) optimization models (min-ACRWA) with survivability. These models take step by step transition from the classical RWA (fixed destination) to anycast routing principle including shared path protection scheme. In the second part, we present scalable optimization models for maximizing the IT services (max-ACRWA) subject to survivability mechanism under limited link transport capacities. We also propose the link capacity formulations based on the distance from the servers and the traffic data set. In the third part, we jointly investigate the link dimensioning and the location of servers in an optical grid, where the anycast routing principle is applied for resiliency under different levels of protection schemes. We propose three different decomposition schemes for joint optimization of link dimensioning and finding the location of servers. In the last part of this research, we propose the exact task scheduling ILP formulations for optical grids (data centers). These formulations can also be used in advance reservation systems to allocate the grid resources. The purpose of this study is to design efficient tools for planning and management of the optical grid networks

Dynamic routing of reliability-differentiated connections in WDM optical networks

Master'sMASTER OF ENGINEERIN

p-Cycle Based Protection in WDM Mesh Networks

Abstract p-Cycle Based Protection in WDM Mesh Networks Honghui Li, Ph.D. Concordia University, 2012 WDM techniques enable single fiber to carry huge amount of data. However, optical WDM networks are prone to failures, and therefore survivability is a very important requirement in the design of optical networks. In the context of network survivability, p-cycle based schemes attracted extensive research interests as they well balance the recovery speed and the capacity efficiency. Towards the design of p-cycle based survivableWDM mesh networks, some issues still need to be addressed. The conventional p-cycle design models and solution methods suffers from scalability issues. Besides, most studies on the design of p-cycle based schemes only cope with single link failures without any concern about single node failures. Moreover, loop backs may exist in the recovery paths along p-cycles, which lead to unnecessary stretching of the recovery path lengths. This thesis investigates the scalable and efficient design of segment p-cycles against single link failures. The optimization models and their solutions rely on large-scale optimization techniques, namely, Column Generation (CG) modeling and solution, where segment pcycle candidates are dynamically generated during the optimization process. To ensure full node protection in the context of link p-cycles, we propose an efficient protection scheme, called node p-cycles, and develop a scalable optimization design model. It is shown that, depending on the network topology, node p-cycles sometimes outperform path p-cycles in iii terms of capacity efficiency. Also, an enhanced segment p-cycle scheme is proposed, entitled segment Np-cycles, for full link and node protection. Again, the CG-based optimization models are developed for the design of segment Np-cycles. Two objectives are considered, minimizing the spare capacity usage and minimizing the CAPEX cost. It is shown that segment Np-cycles can ensure full node protection with marginal extra cost in comparison with segment p-cycles for link protection. Segment Np-cycles provide faster recovery speed than path p-cycles although they are slightly more costly than path p-cycles. Furthermore, we propose the shortcut p-cycle scheme, i.e., p-cycles free of loop backs for full node and link protection, in addition to shortcuts in the protection paths. A CG-based optimization model for the design of shortcut p-cycles is formulated as well. It is shown that, for full node protection, shortcut p-cycles have advantages over path p-cycles with respect to capacity efficiency and recovery speed. We have studied a whole sequence of protection schemes from link p-cycles to path p-cycles, and concluded that the best compromise is the segment Np-cycle scheme for full node protection with respect to capacity efficiency and recovery time. Therefore, this thesis offers to network operators several interesting alternatives to path p-cycles in the design of survivable WDM mesh networks against any single link/node failures

Survivable mesh-network design & optimization to support multiple QoP service classes

Every second, vast amounts of data are transferred over communication systems around the world, and as a result, the demands on optical infrastructures are extending beyond the traditional, ring-based architecture. The range of content and services available from the Internet is increasing, and network operations are constantly under pressure to expand their optical networks in order to keep pace with the ever increasing demand for higher speed and more reliable links

Fault Localization in All-Optical Mesh Networks

Fault management is a challenging task in all-optical wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) networks. However, fast fault localization for shared risk link groups (SRLGs) with multiple links is essential for building a fully survival and functional transparent all-optical mesh network. Monitoring trail (m-trail) technology is an effective approach to achieve the goal, whereby a set of m-trails are derived for unambiguous fault localization (UFL). However, an m-trail traverses through a link by utilizing a dedicated wavelength channel (WL), causing a significant amount of resource consumption. In addition, existing m-trail methods incur long and variable alarm dissemination delay. We introduce a novel framework of real-time fault localization in all-optical WDM mesh networks, called the monitoring-burst (m-burst), which aims at initiating a balanced trade-off between consumed monitoring resources and fault localization latency. The m-burst framework has a single monitoring node (MN) and requires one WL in each unidirectional link if the link is traversed by any m-trail. The MN launches short duration optical bursts periodically along each m-trail to probe the links of the m-trail. Bursts along different m-trails are kept non-overlapping through each unidirectional link by scheduling burst launching times from the MN and multiplexing multiple bursts, if any, traversing the link. Thus, the MN can unambiguously localize the failed links by identifying the lost bursts without incurring any alarm dissemination delay. We have proposed several novel m-trail allocation, burst launching time scheduling, and node switch fabric configuration schemes. Numerical results show that the schemes, when deployed in the m-burst framework, are able to localize single-link and multi-link SRLG faults unambiguously, with reasonable fault localization latency, by using at most one WL in each unidirectional link. To reduce the fault localization latency further, we also introduce a novel methodology called nested m-trails. At first, mesh networks are decomposed into cycles and trails. Each cycle (trail) is realized as an independent virtual ring (linear) network using a separate pair of WLs (one WL in each direction) in each undirected link traversed by the cycle (trail). Then, sets of m-trails, i.e., nested m-trails, derived in each virtual network are deployed independently in the m-burst framework for ring (linear) networks. As a result, the fault localization latency is reduced significantly. Moreover, the application of nested m-trails in adaptive probing also reduces the number of sequential probes significantly. Therefore, practical deployment of adaptive probing is now possible. However, the WL consumption of the nested m-trail technique is not limited by one WL per unidirectional link. Thus, further investigation is needed to reduce the WL consumption of the technique.1 yea