Softwarization of networks, clouds, and internet of things

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ACINO: Second year report on dissemination and communication activities

This ACINO deliverable presents the communication and dissemination activities performed by the consortium during the first two years of the project. We have communicated using our website, Twitter account and by various communication actions: The website saw over 3000 unique visitors during the first year and over 4000 during the second year; The consortium Twitter account had 49 followers at the end of the first year and 80 at the end of the second year. We posted 50 tweets during the first year and 40 more during the second year; We also held a press release and an interview in a magazine during the first year, and had three more similar communication actions during the second year. The dissemination activities have been composed of participation in public events where the goals and concepts of ACINO were presented via publications, presentation, workshops, courses and demonstrations. Overall, over forty different dissemination activities have been performed: An article has been published in peer-reviewed, open access Journal of Green Engineering; Eighteen articles have been published in conferences: four during the first year and fourteen during the second. One of them was a post-deadline and six were invited papers; We have co-organised three workshops: the Workshop on Network Function Virtualization and Programmable Networks at EUCNC 2015, the first Workshop on Multi-Layer Network Orchestration (NetOrch) at ICTON 2016 and the stand-alone ONOS/CORD workshop; We have held 16 talks, tutorial, courses and demonstrations; Consortium members have won two prizes for work related to ACINO: a team of developers won the 3rd prize of the ONOS Build Hackathon, and Telefónica won the Best SDN-NFV solution award at the LTE and 5G World conference by presenting a solution in which Sedona Systems was involved; We have contributed to six IETF standardisation documents and done some implementation and test of these standards. We have contributed to two open source projects: the NetPhony and ONOS controllers, with the implementation of main features being accepted and merged to the core code of these open source projects. Finally, the project has devised detailed plans for its dissemination activities for the last year of the project. We have: Confirmed plans for the organisation of a workshop, the second edition of the NetOrch workshop, co-located with the ICTON conference; A solid plan for continued dissemination in conferences (already five accepted conference papers, five talk invitations and a list of conferences of interest) and in peer-reviewed journals, with one article accepted for publication in the Journal of Lightwave Technology, two articles under review and plans for four more; Some more planned contribution to open source projects

Self-healing and SDN: bridging the gap

Achieving high programmability has become an essential aim of network research due to the ever-increasing internet traffic. Software-Defined Network (SDN) is an emerging architecture aimed to address this need. However, maintaining accurate knowledge of the network after a failure is one of the largest challenges in the SDN. Motivated by this reality, this paper focuses on the use of self-healing properties to boost the SDN robustness. This approach, unlike traditional schemes, is not based on proactively configuring multiple (and memory-intensive) backup paths in each switch or performing a reactive and time-consuming routing computation at the controller level. Instead, the control paths are quickly recovered by local switch actions and subsequently optimized by global controller knowledge. Obtained results show that the proposed approach recovers the control topology effectively in terms of time and message load over a wide range of generated networks. Consequently, scalability issues of traditional fault recovery strategies are avoided.Postprint (published version

A use case of low power wide area networks in future 5G healthcare applications

Abstract. The trend in all cellular evolution to the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) has always been to offer users continuously increasing data rates. However, the next leap forwards towards the 5th Generation Mobile Networks (5G) will be mainly addressing the needs of devices. Machines communicating with each other, sensors reporting to a server, or even machines communicating with humans, these are all different aspects of the same technology; the Internet of Things (IoT). The key differentiator between Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications and IoT will be the added -feature of connecting devices and sensors not only to themselves, but also to the internet. The appropriate communications network is the key to allow this connectivity. Local Area Networks (LANs) and Wide Area Networks (WANs) have been thought of as enablers for IoT, but since they both suffered from limitations in IoT aspects, the need for a new enabling technology was evident. LPWANs are networks dedicated to catering for the needs of IoT such as providing low energy consumption for wireless devices. LPWANs can be categorized into proprietary LPWANs and cellular LPWANs. Proprietary LPWANs are created by an alliance of companies working together on creating a communications standard operating in unlicensed frequency bands. An example of proprietary LPWANs is LoRa. Whereas cellular LPWANs are standardized by the 3rd Partnership Project (3GPP) and they are basically versions of the LTE standard especially designed for machine communications. An example of cellular LPWANs is Narrowband IoT (NB IoT). This diploma thesis documents the usage of LoRa and NB IoT in a healthcare use case of IoT. It describes the steps and challenges of deploying an LTE network at a target site, which will be used by the LoRa and NB IoT sensors to transmit data through the 5G test network (5GTN) to a desired server location for storing and later analysis.Matalan tehonkulutuksen ja pitkänkantaman teknologian käyttötapaus tulevaisuuden 5G:tä hyödyntävissä terveydenhoidon sovelluksissa. Tiivistelmä. Pitemmän aikavälin tarkastelussa matkaviestintäteknologian kehittyminen nykyisin käytössä olevaan Long-Term Evolution (LTE) teknologiaan on tarkoittanut käyttäjille yhä suurempia datanopeuksia. Seuraavassa askeleessa kohti 5. sukupolven matkaviestintäverkkoja (5G) lähestytään kehitystä myös laitteiden tarpeiden lähtökohdista. Toistensa kanssa kommunikoivat koneet, palvelimille dataa lähettävät anturit tai jopa ihmisten kanssa kommunikoivat koneet ovat kaikki eri puolia samasta teknologisesta käsitteestä; esineiden internetistä (IoT). Oleellisin ero koneiden välisessä kommunikoinnissa (M2M) ja IoT:ssä on, että erinäiset laitteet tulevat olemaan yhdistettyinä paitsi toisiinsa myös internettiin. Tätä kytkentäisyyttä varten tarvitaan tarkoitukseen kehitetty matkaviestinverkko. Sekä lähiverkkoja (LAN) että suuralueverkkoja (WAN) on pidetty mahdollisina IoT mahdollistajina, mutta näiden molempien käsitteiden alle kuuluvissa teknologioissa on rajoitteita IoT:n vaatimusten lähtökohdista, joten uuden teknologian kehittäminen oli tarpeellista. Matalan tehonkulutuksen suuralueverkko (LP-WAN) on käsite, johon luokitellaan eri teknologioita, joita on kehitetty erityisesti IoT:n tarpeista lähtien. LP-WAN voidaan jaotella ainakin itse kehitettyihin ja matkaviestinverkkoihin perustuviin teknologisiin ratkaisuihin. Itse kehitetyt ratkaisut on luotu lukuisten yritysten yhteenliittymissä eli alliansseissa ja nämä ratkaisut keskittyvät lisensoimattomilla taajuuksilla toimiviin langattomiin ratkaisuihin, joista esimerkkinä laajasti käytössä oleva LoRa. Matkaviestinverkkoihin perustuvat lisensoiduilla taajuuksilla toimivat ratkaisut on puolestaan erikseen standardoitu 3GPP-nimisessä yhteenliittymässä, joka nykyisellään vastaa 2G, 3G ja LTE:n standardoiduista päätöksistä. Esimerkki 3GPP:n alaisesta LPWAN-luokkaan kuuluvasta teknologiasta on kapea kaistainen IoT-teknologia, NB-IoT. Tässä diplomityössä keskitytään terveydenhoidon käyttötapaukseen, missä antureiden mittaamaa tietoa siirretään langattomasti käyttäen sekä LoRa että NB-IoT teknologioita. Työssä kuvataan eri vaiheet ja haasteet, joita liittyi kun rakennetaan erikseen tiettyyn kohteeseen LTE-verkon radiopeitto, jotta LoRa:a ja NB-IoT:a käyttävät anturit saadaan välittämään mitattua dataa halutulle palvelimelle säilytykseen ja myöhempää analysointia varten. LTE-radiopeiton rakensi Oulun yliopiston omistama 5G testiverkko, jonka tarkoitus on tukea sekä tutkimusta että ympäröivää ekosysteemiä tulevaisuuden 5G:n kehityksessä

Efficient caching through stateful SDN in named data networking

Named data networking (NDN) is an innovative paradigm to provide content-based services in future networks. As compared with legacy networks, naming of network packets and in-network caching of content make NDN more feasible for content dissemination. However, the implementation of NDN requires drastic changes to the existing network infrastructure. One feasible approach is to use software-defined networking (SDN), according to which the control of the network is delegated to a centralized controller, which configures the forwarding data plane. This approach leads to large signaling overhead and large end-to-end delays. In order to overcome these issues, we propose to enable NDN using a stateful data plane in the SDN network. In particular, we realize the functionality of an NDN node using a stateful SDN switch attached with a local cache for content storage and use OpenState to implement such an approach. In our solution, no involvement of the controller is required once the OpenState switch has been configured. We benchmark the performance of our solution against the traditional SDN approach considering several relevant metrics. Experimental results highlight the benefits of a stateful approach and of our implementation, which avoids signaling overhead and significantly reduces end-to-end delays.This work is partially supported by the H2020 5G-TRANSFORMER project (grant no. 761536) and the H2020 HIGHTS project (grant no. 636537). EURECOM acknowledges the support of its industrial members, namely, BMW Group, IABG, Monaco Telecom, Orange, SAP, ST Microelectronics, and Symantec

A service-oriented approach for dynamic chaining of virtual network functions over multi-provider software-defined networks

Emerging technologies such as Software-Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) promise to address cost reduction and flexibility in network operation while enabling innovative network service delivery models. However, operational network service delivery solutions still need to be developed that actually exploit these technologies, especially at the multi-provider level. Indeed, the implementation of network functions as software running over a virtualized infrastructure and provisioned on a service basis let one envisage an ecosystem of network services that are dynamically and flexibly assembled by orchestrating Virtual Network Functions even across different provider domains, thereby coping with changeable user and service requirements and context conditions. In this paper we propose an approach that adopts Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) technology-agnostic architectural guidelines in the design of a solution for orchestrating and dynamically chaining Virtual Network Functions. We discuss how SOA, NFV, and SDN may complement each other in realizing dynamic network function chaining through service composition specification, service selection, service delivery, and placement tasks. Then, we describe the architecture of a SOA-inspired NFV orchestrator, which leverages SDN-based network control capabilities to address an effective delivery of elastic chains of Virtual Network Functions. Preliminary results of prototype implementation and testing activities are also presented. The benefits for Network Service Providers are also described that derive from the adaptive network service provisioning in a multi-provider environment through the orchestration of computing and networking services to provide end users with an enhanced service experience

Security and Privacy of IP-ICN Coexistence: A Comprehensive Survey

Internet usage has changed from its first design. Hence, the current Internet must cope with some limitations, including performance degradation, availability of IP addresses, and multiple security and privacy issues. Nevertheless, to unsettle the current Internet's network layer i.e., Internet Protocol with ICN is a challenging, expensive task. It also requires worldwide coordination among Internet Service Providers , backbone, and Autonomous Services. Additionally, history showed that technology changes e.g., from 3G to 4G, from IPv4 to IPv6 are not immediate, and usually, the replacement includes a long coexistence period between the old and new technology. Similarly, we believe that the process of replacement of the current Internet will surely transition through the coexistence of IP and ICN. Although the tremendous amount of security and privacy issues of the current Internet taught us the importance of securely designing the architectures, only a few of the proposed architectures place the security-by-design. Therefore, this article aims to provide the first comprehensive Security and Privacy analysis of the state-of-the-art coexistence architectures. Additionally, it yields a horizontal comparison of security and privacy among three deployment approaches of IP and ICN protocol i.e., overlay, underlay, and hybrid and a vertical comparison among ten considered security and privacy features. As a result of our analysis, emerges that most of the architectures utterly fail to provide several SP features including data and traffic flow confidentiality, availability and communication anonymity. We believe this article draws a picture of the secure combination of current and future protocol stacks during the coexistence phase that the Internet will definitely walk across