IDEALIST control and service management solutions for dynamic and adaptive flexi-grid DWDM networks

Wavelength Switched Optical Networks (WSON) were designed with the premise that all channels in a network have the same spectrum needs, based on the ITU-T DWDM grid. However, this rigid grid-based approach is not adapted to the spectrum requirements of the signals that are best candidates for long-reach transmission and high-speed data rates of 400Gbps and beyond. An innovative approach is to evolve the fixed DWDM grid to a flexible grid, in which the optical spectrum is partitioned into fixed-sized spectrum slices. This allows facilitating the required amount of optical bandwidth and spectrum for an elastic optical connection to be dynamically and adaptively allocated by assigning the necessary number of slices of spectrum. The ICT IDEALIST project will provide the architectural design, protocol specification, implementation, evaluation and standardization of a control plane and a network and service management system. This architecture and tools are necessary to introduce dynamicity, elasticity and adaptation in flexi-grid DWDM networks. This paper provides an overview of the objectives, framework, functional requirements and use cases of the elastic control plane and the adaptive network and service management system targeted in the ICT IDEALIST project

A Survey on the Contributions of Software-Defined Networking to Traffic Engineering

Since the appearance of OpenFlow back in 2008, software-defined networking (SDN) has gained momentum. Although there are some discrepancies between the standards developing organizations working with SDN about what SDN is and how it is defined, they all outline traffic engineering (TE) as a key application. One of the most common objectives of TE is the congestion minimization, where techniques such as traffic splitting among multiple paths or advanced reservation systems are used. In such a scenario, this manuscript surveys the role of a comprehensive list of SDN protocols in TE solutions, in order to assess how these protocols can benefit TE. The SDN protocols have been categorized using the SDN architecture proposed by the open networking foundation, which differentiates among data-controller plane interfaces, application-controller plane interfaces, and management interfaces, in order to state how the interface type in which they operate influences TE. In addition, the impact of the SDN protocols on TE has been evaluated by comparing them with the path computation element (PCE)-based architecture. The PCE-based architecture has been selected to measure the impact of SDN on TE because it is the most novel TE architecture until the date, and because it already defines a set of metrics to measure the performance of TE solutions. We conclude that using the three types of interfaces simultaneously will result in more powerful and enhanced TE solutions, since they benefit TE in complementary ways.European Commission through the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (GN4) under Grant 691567 Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the Secure Deployment of Services Over SDN and NFV-based Networks Project S&NSEC under Grant TEC2013-47960-C4-3-

Bayesian Adaptive Path Allocation Techniques for Intra-Datacenter Workloads

Data center networks (DCNs) are the backbone of many cloud and Internet services. They are vulnerable to link failures, that occur on a daily basis, with a high frequency. Service disruption due to link failure may incur financial losses, compliance breaches and reputation damage. Performance metrics such as packet loss and routing flaps are negatively affected by these failure events. We propose a new Bayesian learning approach towards adaptive path allocation that aims to improve DCN performance by reducing both packet loss and routing flaps ratios. The proposed approach incorporates historical information about link failure and usage probabilities into its allocation procedure, and updates this information on-the-fly during DCN operational time. We evaluate the proposed framework using an experimental platform built with the POX controller and the Mininet emulator. Compared with a benchmark shortest path algorithm, the results show that the proposed methods perform better in terms of reducing the packet loss and routing flaps

Constructing Dynamic Ad-hoc Emergency Networks using Software-Defined Wireless Mesh Networks

Natural disasters and other emergency situations have the potential to destroy a whole network infrastructure needed for communication critical to emergency rescue, evacuation, and initial rehabilitation. Hence, the research community has begun to focus attention on rapid network reconstruction in such emergencies; however, research has tried to create or improve emergency response systems using traditional radio and satellite communications, which face high operation costs and frequent disruptions. This thesis proposes a centralized monitoring and control system to reconstruct ad-hoc networks in emergencies by using software-defined wireless mesh networks (SDWMN). The proposed framework utilizes wireless mesh networks and software-defined networking to provide real-time network monitoring services to restore Internet access in a targeted disaster zone. It dispatches mobile devices including unmanned aerial vehicles and self-driving cars to the most efficient location aggregation to recover impaired network connections by using a new GPS position finder (GPS-PF) algorithm. The algorithm is based on density-based spatial clustering that calculates the best position to deploy one of the mobile devices. The proposed system is evaluated using the common open research emulator to demonstrate its efficiency and high accessibility in emergency situations. The results obtained from the evaluation show that the performance of the emergency communication system is improved considerably with the incorporation of the framework

A mobile code bundle extension for application-defined routing in delay and disruption tolerant networking

Grup de recerca SENDA (Security of Network and Distributed Applications)In this paper, we introduce software code to improve Delay and Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) performance. DTN is extremely useful when source and destination nodes are intermittently connected. DTN implementations use application-specific routing algorithms to overcome those limitations. However, current implementations do not support the concurrent execution of several routing algorithms. In this paper, we contribute to this issue providing a solution that consists on extending the messages being communicated by incorporating software code for forwarding, lifetime control and prioritisation purposes. Our proposal stems from the idea of moving the routing algorithms from the host to the message. This solution is compatible with Bundle Protocol (BP) and facilitates the deployment of applications with new routing needs. A real case study based on an emergency scenario is presented to provide details of a real implementation. Several simulations are presented to prove the feasibility and usability of the system and to analyse its performance in comparison to state-of-the-art approaches