GNFC: Towards Network Function Cloudification

An increasing demand is seen from enterprises to host and dynamically manage middlebox services in public clouds in order to leverage the same benefits that network functions provide in traditional, in-house deployments. However, today's public clouds provide only a limited view and programmability for tenants that challenges flexible deployment of transparent, software-defined network functions. Moreover, current virtual network functions can't take full advantage of a virtualized cloud environment, limiting scalability and fault tolerance. In this paper we review and evaluate the current infrastructural limitations imposed by public cloud providers and present the design and implementation of GNFC, a cloud-based Network Function Virtualization (NFV) framework that gives tenants the ability to transparently attach stateless, container-based network functions to their services hosted in public clouds. We evaluate the proposed system over three public cloud providers (Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure and Google Compute Engine) and show the effects on end-to-end latency and throughput using various instance types for NFV hosts

A Knowledge Transfer Partnership - the development of a Bespoke Enterprise Resource Planning System in the UK

Abstract. A Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTP) is a UK-wide programme designed to enable businesses to improve their competitiveness, productivity and performance. A KTP achieves this through the forming of a Partnership between a business and an academic institution. The aim is to enable businesses to access skills and expertise from academics and embed this knowledge in their businesses in order to develop the business. The knowledge sought is embedded into the business through a project, or projects, undertaken by a recently qualified person (known as the Associate). Part funding is provided by the government towards the Associate’s salary and towards the release of an Academic supervisor who works a half a day a week at the company. KTPs can vary in length from 6 months to three years, depending on the needs of the business and the desired outcomes. Therefore a KTP enables new capability to be embedded into the business and has benefited and continues to benefit a wide range of businesses across many sectors in the UK, including micro sized, small and large businesses across many sectors. This paper describes a Knowledge Transfer Partnership project between the University of Hertfordshire and a small and medium sized enterprise (SME) based in Cambridgeshire, UK.Final Accepted Versio

The Design and Implementation of a bespoke Enterprise Resource Planning System (ERP) for an acoustical engineering company

This paper will describe the tasks completed so far as part of a Knowledge Transfer Partnership between the University of Hertfordshire and Acoustical Control Engineers (ACE) a ‘small and medium sized enterprise’ (SME) based in Cambridgeshire, UK. ACE’s 25 personnel design, manufacture and install noise and vibration control systems to solve a wide range of acoustic problems. The projects undertaken include acoustic enclosures for supermarket refrigeration plant and for generators used in many situations, together with other more diverse applications such as controlling noise in the workplace and even on a luxury boat. Before the current KTP project the company used some partially computerised systems consisting of spreadsheets to perform acoustic analyses, pricing and project management functions supplemented with a paper based system to ‘fill the gaps’. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems provide an integrated database for all parts of the organisation allowing decisions to be based on a complete understanding of the organisation’s information, avoiding the problems due to duplication of data and ensuring that the consequences of decisions in one part of the organisation are reflected in the planning and control systems of the rest of the organisation. ERP systems became popular from the 1990’s mainly in relatively large organisations due to the complexity and cost of these systems. This project is unusual in that rather than adapting an off-the-shelf ERP solution to ACE’s very specific and specialised requirements we are taking an ERP development approach in an SME whose legacy systems are made up of spreadsheet and paper based systems. For the software development an Agile approach has been used. Agile involves software development methods based on iterative and incremental development. The initial attempt was to start developing the ERP from an Open Source ERP Source Code; however this effort was futile as a result of the bespoke nature of ACE’s business and product lines. Mapping ACE’s data model to the database which any existing ERP system could be adapted to, proved to be a very difficult problem. Therefore, developing the ERP from first principles was inevitable. Several of the ERP modules have been developed, user training has taken place and the core modules have been signed off. The project is due to complete in September 2014 and by this time we will have further information on how the ERP system has increased the competitiveness of the company, as well as experience of introducing an ERP into an SME. However, as would be expected the work undertaken developing the system so far has had several significant effects on ACE and acted as a catalyst for change in various parts of ACE’s business.Non peer reviewe

Building an Emulation Environment for Cyber Security Analyses of Complex Networked Systems

Computer networks are undergoing a phenomenal growth, driven by the rapidly increasing number of nodes constituting the networks. At the same time, the number of security threats on Internet and intranet networks is constantly growing, and the testing and experimentation of cyber defense solutions requires the availability of separate, test environments that best emulate the complexity of a real system. Such environments support the deployment and monitoring of complex mission-driven network scenarios, thus enabling the study of cyber defense strategies under real and controllable traffic and attack scenarios. In this paper, we propose a methodology that makes use of a combination of techniques of network and security assessment, and the use of cloud technologies to build an emulation environment with adjustable degree of affinity with respect to actual reference networks or planned systems. As a byproduct, starting from a specific study case, we collected a dataset consisting of complete network traces comprising benign and malicious traffic, which is feature-rich and publicly available