In-Production Continuous Testing for Future Telco Cloud

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging paradigm to design, build and operate networks. The driving motivation of SDN was the need for a major change in network technologies to support a configuration, management, operation, reconfiguration and evolution than in current computer networks. In the SDN world, performance it is not only related to the behaviour of the data plane. As the separation of control plane and data plane makes the latter significantly more agile, it lays off all the complex processing workload to the control plane. This is further exacerbated in distributed network controller, where the control plane is additionally loaded with the state synchronization overhead. Furthermore, the introduction of SDNs technologies has raised advanced challenges in achieving failure resilience, meant as the persistence of service delivery that can justifiably be trusted, when facing changes, and fault tolerance, meant as the ability to avoid service failures in the presence of faults. Therefore, along with the “softwarization” of network services, it is an important goal in the engineering of such services, e.g. SDNs and NFVs, to be able to test and assess the proper functioning not only in emulated conditions before release and deployment, but also “in-production”, when the system is under real operating conditions.   The goal of this thesis is to devise an approach to evaluate not only the performance, but also the effectiveness of the failure detection, and mitigation mechanisms provided by SDN controllers, as well as the capability of the SDNs to ultimately satisfy nonfunctional requirements, especially resiliency, availability, and reliability. The approach consists of exploiting benchmarking techniques, such as the failure injection, to get continuously feedback on the performance as well as capabilities of the SDN services to survive failures, which is of paramount importance to improve the effective- ness of the system internal mechanisms in reacting to anomalous situations potentially occurring in operation, while its services are regularly updated or improved. Within this vision, this dissertation first presents SCP-CLUB (SDN Control Plane CLoUd-based Benchmarking), a benchmarking frame- work designed to automate the characterization of SDN control plane performance, resilience and fault tolerance in telco cloud deployments. The idea is to provide the same level of automation available in deploying NFV function, for the testing of different configuration, using idle cycles of the telco cloud infrastructure. Then, the dissertation proposes an extension of the framework with mechanisms to evaluate the runtime behaviour of a Telco Cloud SDN under (possibly unforeseen) failure conditions, by exploiting the software failure injection

Sei whale (Balaenoptera borealis) ecology and management in the North Atlantic

Tese de Doutoramento em Ciências do Mar, especialidade em Ecologia Marinha.O estado actual da investigação e lacunas de conhecimento sobre a biologia e ecologia da baleia sardinheira (Balaenoptera borealis) no Atlântico Norte (AN) são revistos e quantificados. As áreas de investimento necessário para suportar a gestão da espécie são identificadas e são feitas sugestões para resolver deficiências de dados. Metodologias modernas de obtenção e tratamento de dados são utilizadas para caracterizar o habitat de verão da baleia sardinheira no Atlântico noroeste, para estudar a migração e comportamento alimentar da espécie no AN e para investigar a plausibilidade das actuais áreas de gestão populacional. Os resultados demonstram que a investigação acerca da baleia sardinheira estagnou há mais de duas décadas. A maior parte do conhecimento sobre aspectos essenciais da espécie baseia-se em dados da baleação. Os padrões de movimentação e a distribuição durante o inverno são virtualmente desconhecidos e subsiste uma grande incerteza quanto à existência e identidade de unidades populacionais no AN. As estimativas de abundância são dispersas e restringem-se a uma pequena parte do habitat de verão da espécie. Para compreender melhor a distribuição da baleia sardinheira no Atlântico noroeste, um modelo foi ajustado a dados de presença obtidos a partir de avistamentos durante campanhas de amostragem navais e aéreas, observações oportunísticas e capturas nas águas da Nova Inglaterra e Nova Escócia. O modelo prevê a existência de habitat favorável em áreas de conhecida agregação da espécie no verão, mas também indica a existência de outras áreas favoráveis, principalmente ao longo do talude continental. Existe alguma sobreposição do habitat da baleia sardinheira com o da baleia franca (Eubalaena glacialis), o que pode resultar em competição alimentar. A migração da baleia sardinheira no AN foi investigada utilizando telemetria por satélite. Os resultados demonstram a existência de um corredor migratório entre os Açores e o Mar do Labrador (ML). Um modelo probabilístico Bayesiano de estados num espaço (state space model) foi utilizado para investigar o comportamento das baleias, demonstrando que o ML é uma área de alimentação para a espécie. As baleias vistas nos Açores provavelmente passam o inverno em regiões a sul ou sudeste do arquipélago, possivelmente ao largo da costa ocidental africana. O estudo permitiu identificar padrões desconhecidos sobre a distribuição, movimentos e utilização de habitat da baleia sardinheira no AN, provendo informação nova e actualizada, essencial para a criação de cenários plausíveis sobre a estrutura populacional da espécie.ABSTRACT: The current knowledge and data gaps on the biology and ecology of the sei whale (Balaenoptera borealis) in the North Atlantic (NA) are reviewed and quantified. Topics where investment is necessary to ensure the proper management of the species are identified and suggestions are made in how to tackle data deficiencies. State of the art ecological research methods are used to characterize the summer habitat of the sei whale off New England and Nova Scotia, the migration and foraging behaviour of the species in the NA, and to investigate the plausibility of existing stock boundaries. It is shown that research on the species has been stagnant for more than two decades. Essential aspects of the sei whale ecology and biology are still mainly derived from whaling records. Movement patterns and winter distribution are not clear and great uncertainty exists about the subdivision of the NA population in further biological units. Abundance estimates in the NA are fragmentary and restricted to a small part of the known part of the species summering habitat. In order to gain insight in the distribution of the sei whale in the north-western Atlantic, a summer habitat suitability model was fit to presence-only data derived from aerial and shipboard sighting surveys, opportunistic sightings and whaling records. The model predicts high habitat suitability for areas of known sei whale aggregation off New England and Nova Scotia but also indicate that other areas, especially along the shelf edge, hold suitable conditions for the occurrence of sei whales in the summer. Further, the model indicates that the sei whale and the right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) habitats partially overlap in the studied region, which can translate in possible competition for prey. The migration of the NA sei whales was investigated using satellite telemetry. Results show a migratory corridor between the Azores islands (Portugal) and the Labrador Sea (LS) during the spring. A Bayesian switching state space model was used to investigate the behaviour of sei whales monitored by satellite tags and it is shown that the LS comprises a foraging ground for the species during spring and summer. The most probable origin of those sei whales is the region south or southeast of the Azores, possibly from wintering grounds thought to exist off northwest Africa. The results of the study uncovered unknown patterns about the distribution, movements and habitat use of the sei whale in the North Atlantic, providing new evidence essential to create plausible hypotheses about the stock structure of the species.The work conducent to this dissertation was supported by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) doctoral grant SFRH/BD/32520/2006 and was partially developed in the scope of projects CETAMARH (POCTI/BSE/38991/01; FCT), MACETUS (MAC/4.2/M10; EU FP5 Interreg), MARMACII (EU InterregIIIB/FEDER), TRACE (PTDC/MAR/74071/2006; FCT) and MAPCET (M2.1.2/F/012/ 2011; DRCT), cofunded by FCT, Direcção Regional da Ciência, Tecnologia e Comunicações (DRCTC), FEDER, the Competitiveness Factors Operational (COMPETE), QREN European Social Fund, and Proconvergencia Açores Program

A framework for smart traffic management using heterogeneous data sources

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Wolverhampton for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.Traffic congestion constitutes a social, economic and environmental issue to modern cities as it can negatively impact travel times, fuel consumption and carbon emissions. Traffic forecasting and incident detection systems are fundamental areas of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) that have been widely researched in the last decade. These systems provide real time information about traffic congestion and other unexpected incidents that can support traffic management agencies to activate strategies and notify users accordingly. However, existing techniques suffer from high false alarm rate and incorrect traffic measurements. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in integrating different types of data sources to achieve higher precision in traffic forecasting and incident detection techniques. In fact, a considerable amount of literature has grown around the influence of integrating data from heterogeneous data sources into existing traffic management systems. This thesis presents a Smart Traffic Management framework for future cities. The proposed framework fusions different data sources and technologies to improve traffic prediction and incident detection systems. It is composed of two components: social media and simulator component. The social media component consists of a text classification algorithm to identify traffic related tweets. These traffic messages are then geolocated using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. Finally, with the purpose of further analysing user emotions within the tweet, stress and relaxation strength detection is performed. The proposed text classification algorithm outperformed similar studies in the literature and demonstrated to be more accurate than other machine learning algorithms in the same dataset. Results from the stress and relaxation analysis detected a significant amount of stress in 40% of the tweets, while the other portion did not show any emotions associated with them. This information can potentially be used for policy making in transportation, to understand the users��� perception of the transportation network. The simulator component proposes an optimisation procedure for determining missing roundabouts and urban roads flow distribution using constrained optimisation. Existing imputation methodologies have been developed on straight section of highways and their applicability for more complex networks have not been validated. This task presented a solution for the unavailability of roadway sensors in specific parts of the network and was able to successfully predict the missing values with very low percentage error. The proposed imputation methodology can serve as an aid for existing traffic forecasting and incident detection methodologies, as well as for the development of more realistic simulation networks

Canais artificiais e a sua influência em processos de planeamento urbano e ordenamento territorial

Os fenómenos de cheia decorrentes de intempéries têm ao longo do tempo assolado o arquipélago da Madeira, particularmente a ilha da Madeira a qual se diferencia, entre outras, pelo seu relevo acentuado. Estas caraterísticas, associadas aos fenómenos de cheia, conduzem a dezenas de vítimas mortais, centenas de afetados direta ou indiretamente e milhares de milhões em custos monetários associados. Insurge-se deste modo como prioritária, a necessidade de simular com o maior rigor possível o escoamento das linhas de água com maior relevância neste tipo de catástrofes, articulando com os princípios de planeamento urbano em vigor na região de modo a procurar minimizar os seus riscos e consequências. As linhas de água que atravessam áreas urbanas podem ser classificadas como canais artificiais. Relativamente ao canal natural, as artificiais, introduzem diversas caraterísticas diferentes tais como: largura, profundidade e rugosidade, Camacho (2018). A temática em análise, considera a necessidade de efetuar uma modelação numérica das linhas de água – isto é, a simulação das condições de escoamento nas ribeiras da Região Autónoma da Madeira (RAM), de modo a permitir um ordenamento do território e planeamento urbano mais apropriados, garantindo assim a segurança da população, bem como a preservação de bens materiais. A análise do escoamento verificado nas ribeiras da RAM assume-se como fundamental, tendo em vista a redução de riscos em fenómenos de cheia bem como das respetivas áreas de inundação, sendo para isso particularmente relevante a análise de sensibilidade de diversos parâmetros tais como: fórmulas de transporte sólido, coeficientes de Manning-Strickler, condições de fronteira a montante, distribuição granulométrica nas diversas secções transversais consideradas e caudais afluentes. Os canais artificiais, deveriam condicionar a predisposição do tecido urbano de qualquer cidade, região ou país uma vez que em casos extremos de precipitação, eles são os principais responsáveis pelo correto escoamento minimizando qualquer tipologia de risco associado a cheias. Contudo o que acontece década após década é uma continua ocupação urbana na proximidade das principais linhas de água, tendo a agravante de esta se intensificar mais a jusante o que obviamente promove um acréscimo à sua perigosidade – uma vez que, estas zonas são as mais propícias a serem afetadas por enxurradas e/ou cheias através do galgamento dos leitos das ribeiras. Considerando que a ilha da Madeira é periodicamente afetada por chuvas de alta intensidade, associadas à sua urografia, assume-se como fundamental que os vários instrumentos de gestão territorial contemplem, como mínimo uma carta de risco municipal utilizando ferramentas como os SIG, bem como, condicionando a forma como se desenvolve o planeamento e respetivo ordenamento do territorial. Por outro lado, começam a ser postos em prática os mecanismos anteriormente descritos nos concelhos onde as enxurradas/cheias/aluviões têm protagonizado um maior impacto negativo, nomeadamente quanto à criação (e inclusão no respetivo PDM) da carta de risco de cheias e inundações da Ribeira Brava, a inclusão das áreas em risco ou ameaçadas por cheias na planta de ordenamento II do PDM do Funchal e, ainda da publicação no Jornal Oficial da Região Autónoma da Madeira (JORAM) da criação do Plano de Gestão dos Riscos de Inundações da RAM (PGRI-RAM).Weather-related flooding phenomena have over time plagued the Madeira archipelago, particularly the island of Madeira, which is distinguished, among others, by its marked relief. These characteristics, associated with flood phenomena, lead to dozens of fatalities, hundreds directly or indirectly affected and billions in associated monetary costs. Thus, the need to simulate the flow of the most relevant waterlines in such disasters is a priority to minimize their risks and consequences, as well as to articulate urban planning principles already effective in the region of Madeira. Waterlines running through urban areas can be classified as artificial canals. Regarding the natural channels, the artificial ones introduce several different characteristics such as width, depth or roughness, Camacho (2018). The theme under consideration explores the need to perform numerical modeling of the waterlines - that is, the simulation of flow conditions in the watercourses of the Autonomous Region of Madeira (RAM), to carry out proper spatial and urban planning, thus ensuring the safety of the population as well as the preservation of its goods. The analysis of the runoff in the RAM watercourses is fundamental in order to reduce the risk of flooding, as well as the respective flood-prone areas, being particularly relevant the analysis of several parameters such as: solid transport equations, Manning-Strickler coefficients, upstream boundary conditions, particle size distribution alongside the waterlines considered and tributary flows. Artificial water channels should condition the predisposition of the urban fabric of any city, region or country since in extreme cases of precipitation, they are primarily responsible for the correct drainage minimizing any risk typology associated with floods. However, it seems obvious that decade after decade, the urbanization of the vicinity of the main watercourses and the aggravation of its intensification taking place downstream increase the danger - since these areas are the most prone to be affected by floods through the overflow of the stream beds. Considering that Madeira is periodically affected by high-intensity rainstorms associated with its urography, it is assumed that the various territorial management instruments must include, at minimum a municipal risk map using tools such as GIS, as well as conditioning the way how the urban and the respective territorial planning are developed. On the other hand, the mechanisms previously described are beginning to be implemented in the municipalities where floods have had a major negative impact, particularly with the creation (and inclusion in the respective PDM) of the flood risk map in Ribeira Brava, the inclusion of flood-prone areas in the Funchal´s PDM management plan II and also the publication of the creation of Flood Risk Management Plans (PGRI-RAM) in the Official Journal of the Autonomous Region of Madeira (JORAM)

Fatias de rede fim-a-fim : da extração de perfis de funções de rede a SLAs granulares

Orientador: Christian Rodolfo Esteve RothenbergTese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Elétrica e de ComputaçãoResumo: Nos últimos dez anos, processos de softwarização de redes vêm sendo continuamente diversi- ficados e gradativamente incorporados em produção, principalmente através dos paradigmas de Redes Definidas por Software (ex.: regras de fluxos de rede programáveis) e Virtualização de Funções de Rede (ex.: orquestração de funções virtualizadas de rede). Embasado neste processo o conceito de network slice surge como forma de definição de caminhos de rede fim- a-fim programáveis, possivelmente sobre infrastruturas compartilhadas, contendo requisitos estritos de desempenho e dedicado a um modelo particular de negócios. Esta tese investiga a hipótese de que a desagregação de métricas de desempenho de funções virtualizadas de rede impactam e compõe critérios de alocação de network slices (i.e., diversas opções de utiliza- ção de recursos), os quais quando realizados devem ter seu gerenciamento de ciclo de vida implementado de forma transparente em correspondência ao seu caso de negócios de comu- nicação fim-a-fim. A verificação de tal assertiva se dá em três aspectos: entender os graus de liberdade nos quais métricas de desempenho de funções virtualizadas de rede podem ser expressas; métodos de racionalização da alocação de recursos por network slices e seus re- spectivos critérios; e formas transparentes de rastrear e gerenciar recursos de rede fim-a-fim entre múltiplos domínios administrativos. Para atingir estes objetivos, diversas contribuições são realizadas por esta tese, dentre elas: a construção de uma plataforma para automatização de metodologias de testes de desempenho de funções virtualizadas de redes; a elaboração de uma metodologia para análises de alocações de recursos de network slices baseada em um algoritmo classificador de aprendizado de máquinas e outro algoritmo de análise multi- critério; e a construção de um protótipo utilizando blockchain para a realização de contratos inteligentes envolvendo acordos de serviços entre domínios administrativos de rede. Por meio de experimentos e análises sugerimos que: métricas de desempenho de funções virtualizadas de rede dependem da alocação de recursos, configurações internas e estímulo de tráfego de testes; network slices podem ter suas alocações de recursos coerentemente classificadas por diferentes critérios; e acordos entre domínios administrativos podem ser realizados de forma transparente e em variadas formas de granularidade por meio de contratos inteligentes uti- lizando blockchain. Ao final deste trabalho, com base em uma ampla discussão as perguntas de pesquisa associadas à hipótese são respondidas, de forma que a avaliação da hipótese proposta seja realizada perante uma ampla visão das contribuições e trabalhos futuros desta teseAbstract: In the last ten years, network softwarisation processes have been continuously diversified and gradually incorporated into production, mainly through the paradigms of Software Defined Networks (e.g., programmable network flow rules) and Network Functions Virtualization (e.g., orchestration of virtualized network functions). Based on this process, the concept of network slice emerges as a way of defining end-to-end network programmable paths, possibly over shared network infrastructures, requiring strict performance metrics associated to a par- ticular business case. This thesis investigate the hypothesis that the disaggregation of network function performance metrics impacts and composes a network slice footprint incurring in di- verse slicing feature options, which when realized should have their Service Level Agreement (SLA) life cycle management transparently implemented in correspondence to their fulfilling end-to-end communication business case. The validation of such assertive takes place in three aspects: the degrees of freedom by which performance of virtualized network functions can be expressed; the methods of rationalizing the footprint of network slices; and transparent ways to track and manage network assets among multiple administrative domains. In order to achieve such goals, a series of contributions were achieved by this thesis, among them: the construction of a platform for automating methodologies for performance testing of virtual- ized network functions; an elaboration of a methodology for the analysis of footprint features of network slices based on a machine learning classifier algorithm and a multi-criteria analysis algorithm; and the construction of a prototype using blockchain to carry out smart contracts involving service level agreements between administrative systems. Through experiments and analysis we suggest that: performance metrics of virtualized network functions depend on the allocation of resources, internal configurations and test traffic stimulus; network slices can have their resource allocations consistently analyzed/classified by different criteria; and agree- ments between administrative domains can be performed transparently and in various forms of granularity through blockchain smart contracts. At the end of his thesis, through a wide discussion we answer all the research questions associated to the investigated hypothesis in such way its evaluation is performed in face of wide view of the contributions and future work of this thesisDoutoradoEngenharia de ComputaçãoDoutor em Engenharia ElétricaFUNCAM

A Survey of Intelligent Network Slicing Management for Industrial IoT: Integrated Approaches for Smart Transportation, Smart Energy, and Smart Factory

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IEEE via the DOI in this recordNetwork slicing has been widely agreed as a promising technique to accommodate diverse services for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Smart transportation, smart energy, and smart factory/manufacturing are the three key services to form the backbone of IIoT. Network slicing management is of paramount importance in the face of IIoT services with diversified requirements. It is important to have a comprehensive survey on intelligent network slicing management to provide guidance for future research in this field. In this paper, we provide a thorough investigation and analysis of network slicing management in its general use cases as well as specific IIoT services including smart transportation, smart energy and smart factory, and highlight the advantages and drawbacks across many existing works/surveys and this current survey in terms of a set of important criteria. In addition, we present an architecture for intelligent network slicing management for IIoT focusing on the above three IIoT services. For each service, we provide a detailed analysis of the application requirements and network slicing architecture, as well as the associated enabling technologies. Further, we present a deep understanding of network slicing orchestration and management for each service, in terms of orchestration architecture, AI-assisted management and operation, edge computing empowered network slicing, reliability, and security. For the presented architecture for intelligent network slicing management and its application in each IIoT service, we identify the corresponding key challenges and open issues that can guide future research. To facilitate the understanding of the implementation, we provide a case study of the intelligent network slicing management for integrated smart transportation, smart energy, and smart factory. Some lessons learnt include: 1) For smart transportation, it is necessary to explicitly identify service function chains (SFCs) for specific applications along with the orchestration of underlying VNFs/PNFs for supporting such SFCs; 2) For smart energy, it is crucial to guarantee both ultra-low latency and extremely high reliability; 3) For smart factory, resource management across heterogeneous network domains is of paramount importance. We hope that this survey is useful for both researchers and engineers on the innovation and deployment of intelligent network slicing management for IIoT.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD)Hong Kong RGC Research Impact Fund (RIF)National Natural Science Foundation of ChinaShenzhen Science and Technology Innovation Commissio