NetO-App: A Network Orchestration Application for Centralized Network Management in Small Business Networks

Software-defined networking (SDN) is reshaping the networking paradigm. Previous research shows that SDN has advantages over traditional networks because it separates the control and data plane, leading to greater flexibility through network automation and programmability. Small business networks require flexibility, like service provider networks, to scale, deploy, and self-heal network infrastructure that comprises of cloud operating systems, virtual machines, containers, vendor networking equipment, and virtual network functions (VNFs); however, as SDN evolves in industry, there has been limited research to develop an SDN architecture to fulfill the requirements of small business networks. This research proposes a network architecture that can abstract, orchestrate, and scale configurations based on small business network requirements. Our results show that the proposed architecture provides enhanced network management and operations when combined with the network orchestration application (NetO-App) developed in this research. The NetO-App orchestrates network policies, automates configuration changes, and manages internal and external communication between the campus networking infrastructure.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, To appear in the Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Networks & Communications, 28-29 July 2018, Sydney, Australi

Implementation and analysis of low latency video-conferencing through edge cloud computing

Edge cloud computing seems to be a key enabler of 5G networks which essentially brings the servers as close to the users as possible. Among all the benefits this tendency can provide, this master thesis focuses on the advantages in terms of reduction of the latency. First of all, an Edge network model that combines this paradigm with Software-defined Networks (SDN) is presented so as to provide an example of a potential production scenario. Then, a videoconference application is chosen as a particular case study of latency-sensitive and bandwidth exhaustive application and the traffic that it generates is inspected. Thanks to this analysis, a methodology to compute the latency can be proposed which is used during the test runs afterwards. Lastly, a testbed analogous to the model previously presented showcases the benefits of this approach. The results prove the improvement in the quality of the videoconference by means of a noticeable reduction of the latency when the servers are on the edge. Moreover, it is demonstrated the feasibility of providing a dynamic environment where the server can be live migrated. For the sake of providing a complete quality overview, the impact of the available bandwidth and packet loss is evaluated as well