Disaster-Resilient Control Plane Design and Mapping in Software-Defined Networks

Communication networks, such as core optical networks, heavily depend on their physical infrastructure, and hence they are vulnerable to man-made disasters, such as Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) or Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) attacks, as well as to natural disasters. Large-scale disasters may cause huge data loss and connectivity disruption in these networks. As our dependence on network services increases, the need for novel survivability methods to mitigate the effects of disasters on communication networks becomes a major concern. Software-Defined Networking (SDN), by centralizing control logic and separating it from physical equipment, facilitates network programmability and opens up new ways to design disaster-resilient networks. On the other hand, to fully exploit the potential of SDN, along with data-plane survivability, we also need to design the control plane to be resilient enough to survive network failures caused by disasters. Several distributed SDN controller architectures have been proposed to mitigate the risks of overload and failure, but they are optimized for limited faults without addressing the extent of large-scale disaster failures. For disaster resiliency of the control plane, we propose to design it as a virtual network, which can be solved using Virtual Network Mapping techniques. We select appropriate mapping of the controllers over the physical network such that the connectivity among the controllers (controller-to-controller) and between the switches to the controllers (switch-to-controllers) is not compromised by physical infrastructure failures caused by disasters. We formally model this disaster-aware control-plane design and mapping problem, and demonstrate a significant reduction in the disruption of controller-to-controller and switch-to-controller communication channels using our approach.Comment: 6 page

Enabling Disaster Resilient 4G Mobile Communication Networks

The 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the cellular technology expected to outperform the previous generations and to some extent revolutionize the experience of the users by taking advantage of the most advanced radio access techniques (i.e. OFDMA, SC-FDMA, MIMO). However, the strong dependencies between user equipments (UEs), base stations (eNBs) and the Evolved Packet Core (EPC) limit the flexibility, manageability and resiliency in such networks. In case the communication links between UEs-eNB or eNB-EPC are disrupted, UEs are in fact unable to communicate. In this article, we reshape the 4G mobile network to move towards more virtual and distributed architectures for improving disaster resilience, drastically reducing the dependency between UEs, eNBs and EPC. The contribution of this work is twofold. We firstly present the Flexible Management Entity (FME), a distributed entity which leverages on virtualized EPC functionalities in 4G cellular systems. Second, we introduce a simple and novel device-todevice (D2D) communication scheme allowing the UEs in physical proximity to communicate directly without resorting to the coordination with an eNB.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Communications Magazin

Technology-related disasters:a survey towards disaster-resilient software defined networks

Resilience against disaster scenarios is essential to network operators, not only because of the potential economic impact of a disaster but also because communication networks form the basis of crisis management. COST RECODIS aims at studying measures, rules, techniques and prediction mechanisms for different disaster scenarios. This paper gives an overview of different solutions in the context of technology-related disasters. After a general overview, the paper focuses on resilient Software Defined Networks

Next Generation Cloud Computing: New Trends and Research Directions

The landscape of cloud computing has significantly changed over the last decade. Not only have more providers and service offerings crowded the space, but also cloud infrastructure that was traditionally limited to single provider data centers is now evolving. In this paper, we firstly discuss the changing cloud infrastructure and consider the use of infrastructure from multiple providers and the benefit of decentralising computing away from data centers. These trends have resulted in the need for a variety of new computing architectures that will be offered by future cloud infrastructure. These architectures are anticipated to impact areas, such as connecting people and devices, data-intensive computing, the service space and self-learning systems. Finally, we lay out a roadmap of challenges that will need to be addressed for realising the potential of next generation cloud systems.Comment: Accepted to Future Generation Computer Systems, 07 September 201

UAV-Empowered Disaster-Resilient Edge Architecture for Delay-Sensitive Communication

The fifth-generation (5G) communication systems will enable enhanced mobile broadband, ultra-reliable low latency, and massive connectivity services. The broadband and low-latency services are indispensable to public safety (PS) communication during natural or man-made disasters. Recently, the third generation partnership project long term evolution (3GPPLTE) has emerged as a promising candidate to enable broadband PS communications. In this article, first we present six major PS-LTE enabling services and the current status of PS-LTE in 3GPP releases. Then, we discuss the spectrum bands allocated for PS-LTE in major countries by international telecommunication union (ITU). Finally, we propose a disaster resilient three-layered architecture for PS-LTE (DR-PSLTE). This architecture consists of a software-defined network (SDN) layer to provide centralized control, an unmanned air vehicle (UAV) cloudlet layer to facilitate edge computing or to enable emergency communication link, and a radio access layer. The proposed architecture is flexible and combines the benefits of SDNs and edge computing to efficiently meet the delay requirements of various PS-LTE services. Numerical results verified that under the proposed DR-PSLTE architecture, delay is reduced by 20% as compared with the conventional centralized computing architecture.Comment: 9,

Proactive controller assignment schemes in SDN for fast recovery

​© 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.A sizeable software defined network with a single controller responsible for all forwarding elements is potentially failure-prone and inadequate for dynamic network loads. To this end, having multiple controllers improves resilience and distributes network control overhead. However, when there is a disruption in the control plane, a rapid and performant controller-switch assignment is critical, which is a challenging technical question. In this work, we propose a proactive switch assignment approach in case of controller failures using a genetic algorithm based heuristic that considers controller load distribution, reassignment cost and probability of failure. Moreover, we compare the performance of our scheme with random and greedy algorithms. Experiment results show that our proposed PREFCP framework has better performance in terms of probability of failure and controller load distributio

Autonomic computing architecture for SCADA cyber security

Cognitive computing relates to intelligent computing platforms that are based on the disciplines of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other innovative technologies. These technologies can be used to design systems that mimic the human brain to learn about their environment and can autonomously predict an impending anomalous situation. IBM first used the term ‘Autonomic Computing’ in 2001 to combat the looming complexity crisis (Ganek and Corbi, 2003). The concept has been inspired by the human biological autonomic system. An autonomic system is self-healing, self-regulating, self-optimising and self-protecting (Ganek and Corbi, 2003). Therefore, the system should be able to protect itself against both malicious attacks and unintended mistakes by the operator