Traffic Management Applications for Stateful SDN Data Plane

The successful OpenFlow approach to Software Defined Networking (SDN) allows network programmability through a central controller able to orchestrate a set of dumb switches. However, the simple match/action abstraction of OpenFlow switches constrains the evolution of the forwarding rules to be fully managed by the controller. This can be particularly limiting for a number of applications that are affected by the delay of the slow control path, like traffic management applications. Some recent proposals are pushing toward an evolution of the OpenFlow abstraction to enable the evolution of forwarding policies directly in the data plane based on state machines and local events. In this paper, we present two traffic management applications that exploit a stateful data plane and their prototype implementation based on OpenState, an OpenFlow evolution that we recently proposed.Comment: 6 pages, 9 figure

An adaptive admission control and load balancing algorithm for a QoS-aware Web system

The main objective of this thesis focuses on the design of an adaptive algorithm for admission control and content-aware load balancing for Web traffic. In order to set the context of this work, several reviews are included to introduce the reader in the background concepts of Web load balancing, admission control and the Internet traffic characteristics that may affect the good performance of a Web site. The admission control and load balancing algorithm described in this thesis manages the distribution of traffic to a Web cluster based on QoS requirements. The goal of the proposed scheduling algorithm is to avoid situations in which the system provides a lower performance than desired due to servers' congestion. This is achieved through the implementation of forecasting calculations. Obviously, the increase of the computational cost of the algorithm results in some overhead. This is the reason for designing an adaptive time slot scheduling that sets the execution times of the algorithm depending on the burstiness that is arriving to the system. Therefore, the predictive scheduling algorithm proposed includes an adaptive overhead control. Once defined the scheduling of the algorithm, we design the admission control module based on throughput predictions. The results obtained by several throughput predictors are compared and one of them is selected to be included in our algorithm. The utilisation level that the Web servers will have in the near future is also forecasted and reserved for each service depending on the Service Level Agreement (SLA). Our load balancing strategy is based on a classical policy. Hence, a comparison of several classical load balancing policies is also included in order to know which of them better fits our algorithm. A simulation model has been designed to obtain the results presented in this thesis

Load Balancing in Distributed Cloud Computing: A Reinforcement Learning Algorithms in Heterogeneous Environment

Balancing load in cloud based is an important aspect that plays a vital role in order to achieve sharing of load between different types of resources such as virtual machines that lay on servers, storage in the form of hard drives and servers. Reinforcement learning approaches can be adopted with cloud computing to achieve quality of service factors such as minimized cost and response time, increased throughput, fault tolerance and utilization of all available resources in the network, thus increasing system performance. Reinforcement Learning based approaches result in making effective resource utilization by selecting the best suitable processor for task execution with minimum makespan. Since in the earlier related work done on sharing of load, there are limited reinforcement learning based approaches. However this paper, focuses on the importance of RL based approaches for achieving balanced load in the area of distributed cloud computing. A Reinforcement Learning framework is proposed and implemented for execution of tasks in heterogeneous environments, particularly, Least Load Balancing (LLB) and Booster Reinforcement Controller (BRC) Load Balancing. With the help of reinforcement learning approaches an optimal result is achieved for load sharing and task allocation. In this RL based framework processor workload is taken as an input. In this paper, the results of proposed RL based approaches have been evaluated for cost and makespan and are compared with existing load balancing techniques for task execution and resource utilization.

Scalable and Adaptive Load Balancing on IBM PowerNP

Web and other Internet-based server farms are a critical company resource. A solution to the increased complexity of server farms and to the need to improve the server performance in terms of scalability, fault tolerance and management is to implement a load balancing technique. It consists of a front-end machine which intelligently redirects the traffic to several Real Servers. We discuss the feasibility of implementing adaptive load balancing with minimal flow disruption on the IBM PowerNP Network Processor. We focus our attention on the steady-state part of the algorithm and propose a PowerNP-tailored mapping algorithm derived from Robust Hash Mapping. We propose and show a fast algorithm solution (despite the simple arithmetical logic of the PowerNP), as well as a scalable approach (aiming at minimizing the packet processing time) and, finally, we present some initial performance results

RackBlox: A Software-Defined Rack-Scale Storage System with Network-Storage Co-Design

Software-defined networking (SDN) and software-defined flash (SDF) have been serving as the backbone of modern data centers. They are managed separately to handle I/O requests. At first glance, this is a reasonable design by following the rack-scale hierarchical design principles. However, it suffers from suboptimal end-to-end performance, due to the lack of coordination between SDN and SDF. In this paper, we co-design the SDN and SDF stack by redefining the functions of their control plane and data plane, and splitting up them within a new architecture named RackBlox. RackBlox decouples the storage management functions of flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs), and allow the SDN to track and manage the states of SSDs in a rack. Therefore, we can enable the state sharing between SDN and SDF, and facilitate global storage resource management. RackBlox has three major components: (1) coordinated I/O scheduling, in which it dynamically adjusts the I/O scheduling in the storage stack with the measured and predicted network latency, such that it can coordinate the effort of I/O scheduling across the network and storage stack for achieving predictable end-to-end performance; (2) coordinated garbage collection (GC), in which it will coordinate the GC activities across the SSDs in a rack to minimize their impact on incoming I/O requests; (3) rack-scale wear leveling, in which it enables global wear leveling among SSDs in a rack by periodically swapping data, for achieving improved device lifetime for the entire rack. We implement RackBlox using programmable SSDs and switch. Our experiments demonstrate that RackBlox can reduce the tail latency of I/O requests by up to 5.8x over state-of-the-art rack-scale storage systems.Comment: 14 pages. Published in published in ACM SIGOPS 29th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP'23

Conectividade definida por software em ambientes móveis

Broadband Internet access on trains has become an expected service for passengers, and the rise in quality demand has been posing a challenge to service providers. There are solutions for Internet access on trains that lack the flexibility and redundancy needed for an improved QoS in the network. Thus, this dissertation studies two new load balancing solutions, one distributed and the other centralized. In an emulated train network, routers of each car communicate their network statistics to other nodes of the network, to be used in load balancing decisions. In the distributed solution, each router has the capacity to make load balancing decisions, while in the centralized solution, an onboard controller makes those decisions. The latter solution is based on load balancing in an SDN environment. In this system, a remote entity aggregates the passengers’ traffic and forwards it to an external network, or to the Internet. The systems must provide an improved quality of experience to the passengers on the train and the total avaliable bandwidth should be distributed evenly by all cars. Requirements were established for the systems, which were developed after an in-depth analysis of solutions for Internet access on board found in the literature. After obtaining the results of the performance tests, it was concluded that the systems improve the QoE of the passengers, as long as the network conditions are approximately constant for an extended period.O acesso à Internet de banda larga em comboios tornou-se num serviço esperado por parte dos passageiros e o aumento na exigência de qualidade tem constituído um desafio para os prestadores de serviços. Existem soluções de acesso à Internet em comboios que carecem da flexibilidade e redundância necessárias para uma melhor qualidade de serviço na rede. Assim, esta dissertação estuda duas novas soluções de balanceamento de carga, uma distribuída e outra centralizada. Numa rede de comboio emulada, routers de cada carruagem comunicam as suas estatísticas de rede para outros nós da rede, para posteriormente serem tomadas decisões de balanceamento de carga. Na solução distribuída, cada router tem capacidade de tomar decisões de balanceamento de carga, enquanto que na solução centralizada, um controlador dentro do comboio toma essas decisões. Esta última solução baseiase num balanceamento de carga em ambiente SDN. Neste sistema, uma entidade remota agrega o tráfego dos passageiros e encaminha-o para uma rede externa, ou para a Internet. Os sistemas devem proporcionar uma qualidade de experiência melhorada aos passageiros do comboio e a largura de banda total disponível deve ser distribuída mais uniformememente por todas as carruagens. Requisitos foram estabelecidos para os sistemas, que foram desenvolvidos após uma análise aprofundada das soluções de acesso à Internet em comboios encontradas na literatura. Após a obtenção dos resultados dos testes de desempenho, concluiu-se que as duas soluções melhoram o QoE dos passageiros, desde que as condições da rede sejam aproximadamente constantes durante um certo período.Mestrado em Engenharia de Computadores e Telemátic

Design and deployment of real scenarios of TCP/IP networking and it security for software defined networks with next generation tools

This thesis is about NSX, a Software Defined tool provided by VMware, to deploy and design virtual networks. The recent growth in the marked pushed companies to invest and use this kind of technology. This thesis explains three main NSX concepts and the basis to perform some deployments. Some use cases regarding networking and security are included in this document. The purpose of these use cases is to use them in real scenarios, which is the main purpose of the thesis. The budget to deploy these use cases is included as an estimation about how much a project like this would cost for the company. Finally, there are some conclusions and tips for best practices