Software Defined Networks based Smart Grid Communication: A Comprehensive Survey

The current power grid is no longer a feasible solution due to ever-increasing user demand of electricity, old infrastructure, and reliability issues and thus require transformation to a better grid a.k.a., smart grid (SG). The key features that distinguish SG from the conventional electrical power grid are its capability to perform two-way communication, demand side management, and real time pricing. Despite all these advantages that SG will bring, there are certain issues which are specific to SG communication system. For instance, network management of current SG systems is complex, time consuming, and done manually. Moreover, SG communication (SGC) system is built on different vendor specific devices and protocols. Therefore, the current SG systems are not protocol independent, thus leading to interoperability issue. Software defined network (SDN) has been proposed to monitor and manage the communication networks globally. This article serves as a comprehensive survey on SDN-based SGC. In this article, we first discuss taxonomy of advantages of SDNbased SGC.We then discuss SDN-based SGC architectures, along with case studies. Our article provides an in-depth discussion on routing schemes for SDN-based SGC. We also provide detailed survey of security and privacy schemes applied to SDN-based SGC. We furthermore present challenges, open issues, and future research directions related to SDN-based SGC.Comment: Accepte

Intent-based network slicing for SDN vertical services with assurance: Context, design and preliminary experiments

Network slicing is announced to be one of the key features for 5G infrastructures enabling network operators to provide network services with the flexibility and dynamicity necessary for the vertical services, while relying on Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software-defined Networking (SDN). On the other hand, vertical industries are attracted by flexibility and customization offered by operators through network slicing, especially if slices come with in-built SDN capabilities to programmatically connect their application components and if they are relieved of dealing with detailed technicalities of the underlying (virtual) infrastructure. In this paper, we present an Intent-based deployment of a NFV orchestration stack that allows for the setup of Qos-aware and SDN-enabled network slices toward effective service chaining in the vertical domain. The main aim of the work is to simplify and automate the deployment of tenant-managed SDN-enabled network slices through a declarative approach while abstracting the underlying implementation details and unburdening verticals to deal with technology-specific low-level networking directives. In our approach, the intent-based framework we propose is based on an ETSI NFV MANO platform and is assessed through a set of experimental results demonstrating its feasibility and effectiveness

Do we all really know what a fog node is? Current trends towards an open definition

Fog computing has emerged as a promising technology that can bring cloud applications closer to the physical IoT devices at the network edge. While it is widely known what cloud computing is, how data centers can build the cloud infrastructure and how applications can make use of this infrastructure, there is no common picture on what fog computing and particularly a fog node, as its main building block, really is. One of the first attempts to define a fog node was made by Cisco, qualifying a fog computing system as a “mini-cloud” located at the edge of the network and implemented through a variety of edge devices, interconnected by a variety, mostly wireless, communication technologies. Thus, a fog node would be the infrastructure implementing the said mini-cloud. Other proposals have their own definition of what a fog node is, usually in relation to a specific edge device, a specific use case or an application. In this paper, we first survey the state of the art in technologies for fog computing nodes, paying special attention to the contributions that analyze the role edge devices play in the fog node definition. We summarize and compare the concepts, lessons learned from their implementation, and end up showing how a conceptual framework is emerging towards a unifying fog node definition. We focus on core functionalities of a fog node as well as in the accompanying opportunities and challenges towards their practical realization in the near future.Postprint (author's final draft

Performance assessment of 40 Gbit/s off-the-shelf network cards for virtual network probes in 5G networks

Incoming 5G networks will evolve regarding how they operate due to the use of virtualization technologies. Network functions that are necessary for communication will be virtual and will run on top of commodity servers. Among these functions, it will be essential to deploy monitoring probes, which will provide information regarding how the network is behaving, which will be later analyzed for self-management purposes. However, to date, the network probes have needed to be physical to perform at link-rates in high-speed networks, and it is challenging to deploy them in virtual environments. Thus, it will be necessary to rely on bare-metal accelerators to deal with existing input/output (I/O) performance problems. Next, to control the costs of implementing these virtual network probes, our approach is to leverage the capabilities that current commercial off-the-shelf network cards provide for virtual environments. Specifically, to this end, we have implemented HPCAP40vf, which is a driver that is GPL-licensed and available for download, for network capture in virtual machines. This driver handles the communication with an Intel XL710 40 Gbit/s commercial network card to enable a network monitoring application run within a virtual machine. To store the captured traffic, we have relied on NVMe drives due to their high transference rate, as they are directly connected to the PCIe bus. We have assessed the performance of this approach and compared it with DPDK, in terms of both capturing and storing the network traffic by measuring the achieved data rates. The evaluation has taken into account two virtualization technologies, namely, KVM and Docker, and two access methods to the underlying hardware, namely, VirtIO and PCI passthrough. With this methodology, we have identified bottlenecks and determined the optimal solution in each case to reduce overheads due to virtualization. This approach can also be applied to the development of other performance-hungry virtual network functions. The obtained results demonstrate the feasibility of our proposed approach: when we correctly use the capabilities that current commercial network cards provide, our virtual network probe can monitor at 40 Gbit/s with full packet capture and storage and simultaneously track the traffic among other virtual network functions inside the host and with the external networkThis work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the European Regional Development Fund under the project TRÁFICA (MINECO/FEDER TEC2015-69417-C2-1-R),and by the European Commission under the project H2020METRO-HAUL (Project ID:761727

A Cloud Infrastructure as a Service for an Efficient Usage of IoT Capabilities

The Internet of Things comprises of a system of devices (or objects) connected to the Internet and interacting with each other to satisfy various tasks or goals. These objects could be sensors, actuators, smart phones, smart appliances, etc. With the ever-increasing demand of IoT in daily life as well as in the industry, and billions of devices being connected over the internet, most IoT applications aim for cost and energy efficiency, scalability, and minimal latency in terms of resource provisioning. To fulfill these requirements, Cloud Computing might prove beneficial. Cloud Computing provides on demand access to configurable computing resources (servers, memory, network, etc.) in the cloud, which require minimal management by the end user. It comprises of three service models, which are: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). The cloud IaaS aims at an efficient usage of resources. In the specific case of IoT, these resources are the sensing and actuation capabilities. However, there are still many challenges that the design and implementation of an IoT IaaS faces. Some examples are the heterogeneity of the sensors and actuators, orchestration, provision of bare metal access, and also publication and discovery of the capabilities of IoT devices. This thesis aims at the design and implementation of an architecture for IoT IaaS. First, it lays down a set of requirements essential to the architecture. This is followed by a thorough review of the state of the art. Next, it proposes an architecture for IoT IaaS that utilizes node level virtualization for an efficient usage of IoT capabilities. Functional entities are proposed as well as interfaces relying on RESTful Web services. The interfaces include a low-level interface for homogeneously accessing all the heterogenous capabilities of IoT devices, as well as high level interfaces which allow the IoT cloud users (e.g. PaaS or individual applications) to access these capabilities in an efficient manner. We have implemented a prototype using real-life as well as simulated Temperature sensors & Humidity sensors, and EV3 LEGO Mindstorms robots. The architecture is validated by concrete measurements on the prototype and by extensive simulations

Configuração automática de plataforma de gestão de desempenho em ambientes NFV e SDN

Mestrado em Engenharia de Computadores e TelemáticaWith 5G set to arrive within the next three years, this next-generation of mobile networks will transform the mobile industry with a profound impact both on its customers as well as on the existing technologies and network architectures. Software-Defined Networking (SDN), together with Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), are going to play key roles for the operators as they prepare the migration from 4G to 5G allowing them to quickly scale their networks. This dissertation will present a research work done on this new paradigm of virtualized and programmable networks focusing on the performance management, supervision and monitoring domains, aiming to address Self-Organizing Networks (SON) scenarios in a NFV/SDN context, with one of the scenarios being the detection and prediction of potential network and service anomalies. The research work itself was done while participating in a R&D project designated SELFNET (A Framework for Self-Organized Network Management in Virtualized and Software Defined Networks) funded by the European Commission under the H2020 5G-PPP programme, with Altice Labs being one of the participating partners of this project. Performance management system advancements in a 5G scenario require aggregation, correlation and analysis of data gathered from these virtualized and programmable network elements. Both opensource monitoring tools and customized catalog-driven tools were either integrated on or developed with this purpose, and the results show that they were able to successfully address these requirements of the SELFNET project. Current performance management platforms of the network operators in production are designed for non virtualized (non- NFV) and non programmable (non-SDN) networks, and the knowledge gathered while doing this research work allowed Altice Labs to understand how its Altaia performance management platform must evolve in order to be prepared for the upcoming 5G next generation mobile networks.Com o 5G prestes a chegar nos próximos três anos, esta próxima geração de redes móveis irá transformar a indústria de telecomunicações móveis com um impacto profundo nos seus clientes assim como nas tecnologias e arquiteturas de redes. As redes programáveis (SDN), em conjunto com a virtualização de funções de rede (NFV), irão desempenhar papéis vitais para as operadoras na sua migração do 4G para o 5G, permitindo-as escalar as suas redes rapidamente. Esta dissertação irá apresentar um trabalho de investigação realizado sobre este novo paradigma de virtualização e programação de redes, concentrando-se no domínio da gestão de desempenho, supervisionamento e monitoria, abordando cenários de redes auto-organizadas (SON) num contexto NFV/SDN, sendo um destes cenários a deteção e predição de potenciais anomalias de redes e serviços. O trabalho de investigação foi enquadrado num projeto de I&D designado SELFNET (A Framework for Self-Organized Network Management in Virtualized and Software Defined Networks) financiado pela Comissão Europeia no âmbito do programa H2020 5G-PPP, sendo a Altice Labs um dos parceiros participantes deste projeto. Avanços em sistemas de gestão de desempenho em cenários 5G requerem agregação, correlação e análise de dados recolhidos destes elementos de rede programáveis e virtualizados. Ferramentas de monitoria open-source e ferramentas catalog-driven foram integradas ou desenvolvidas com este propósito, e os resultados mostram que estas preencheram os requisitos do projeto SELFNET com sucesso. As plataformas de gestão de desempenho das operadoras de rede atualmente em produção estão concebidas para redes não virtualizadas (non-NFV) e não programáveis (non- SDN), e o conhecimento adquirido durante este trabalho de investigação permitiu à Altice Labs compreender como a sua plataforma de gestão de desempenho (Altaia) terá que evoluir por forma a preparar-se para a próxima geração de redes móveis 5G

A system for remote management of routers in heterogeneous data centers

Data center complexity continues to increase and has be- come one of the main barriers to business development and innovation. Heterogeneity is one of the main factors contributing to this complexity. To address this issue, organizations are moving towards manageability standardization by adopting technologies and protocols recommended by the Web Based Enterprise Management specification. However, in the open source arena more solutions leveraging WBEM need to be de- veloped. This paper describes an end-to-end system implementation to manage GNU/Linux based routers using industry standards, which will contribute to the goal of reducing data center complexity. The solution comprises a number of components from a Perl-based user interface to the corresponding CIM schema and providers that instrument the target system to manage routes and interfaces. The entire system was tested in a virtual environment including different virtual networks, servers, and routers. This implementation represents a unique contribution to the open source community.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativ

Model-driven development of data intensive applications over cloud resources

The proliferation of sensors over the last years has generated large amounts of raw data, forming data streams that need to be processed. In many cases, cloud resources are used for such processing, exploiting their flexibility, but these sensor streaming applications often need to support operational and control actions that have real-time and low-latency requirements that go beyond the cost effective and flexible solutions supported by existing cloud frameworks, such as Apache Kafka, Apache Spark Streaming, or Map-Reduce Streams. In this paper, we describe a model-driven and stepwise refinement methodological approach for streaming applications executed over clouds. The central role is assigned to a set of Petri Net models for specifying functional and non-functional requirements. They support model reuse, and a way to combine formal analysis, simulation, and approximate computation of minimal and maximal boundaries of non-functional requirements when the problem is either mathematically or computationally intractable. We show how our proposal can assist developers in their design and implementation decisions from a performance perspective. Our methodology allows to conduct performance analysis: The methodology is intended for all the engineering process stages, and we can (i) analyse how it can be mapped onto cloud resources, and (ii) obtain key performance indicators, including throughput or economic cost, so that developers are assisted in their development tasks and in their decision taking. In order to illustrate our approach, we make use of the pipelined wavefront array