End-to-end resource management for federated delivery of multimedia services

Recently, the Internet has become a popular platform for the delivery of multimedia content. Currently, multimedia services are either offered by Over-the-top (OTT) providers or by access ISPs over a managed IP network. As OTT providers offer their content across the best-effort Internet, they cannot offer any Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees to their users. On the other hand, users of managed multimedia services are limited to the relatively small selection of content offered by their own ISP. This article presents a framework that combines the advantages of both existing approaches, by dynamically setting up federations between the stakeholders involved in the content delivery process. Specifically, the framework provides an automated mechanism to set up end-to-end federations for QoS-aware delivery of multimedia content across the Internet. QoS contracts are automatically negotiated between the content provider, its customers, and the intermediary network domains. Additionally, a federated resource reservation algorithm is presented, which allows the framework to identify the optimal set of stakeholders and resources to include within a federation. Its goal is to minimize delivery costs for the content provider, while satisfying customer QoS requirements. Moreover, the presented framework allows intermediary storage sites to be included in these federations, supporting on-the-fly deployment of content caches along the delivery paths. The algorithm was thoroughly evaluated in order to validate our approach and assess the merits of including intermediary storage sites. The results clearly show the benefits of our method, with delivery cost reductions of up to 80 % in the evaluated scenario

Segment Routing: a Comprehensive Survey of Research Activities, Standardization Efforts and Implementation Results

Fixed and mobile telecom operators, enterprise network operators and cloud providers strive to face the challenging demands coming from the evolution of IP networks (e.g. huge bandwidth requirements, integration of billions of devices and millions of services in the cloud). Proposed in the early 2010s, Segment Routing (SR) architecture helps face these challenging demands, and it is currently being adopted and deployed. SR architecture is based on the concept of source routing and has interesting scalability properties, as it dramatically reduces the amount of state information to be configured in the core nodes to support complex services. SR architecture was first implemented with the MPLS dataplane and then, quite recently, with the IPv6 dataplane (SRv6). IPv6 SR architecture (SRv6) has been extended from the simple steering of packets across nodes to a general network programming approach, making it very suitable for use cases such as Service Function Chaining and Network Function Virtualization. In this paper we present a tutorial and a comprehensive survey on SR technology, analyzing standardization efforts, patents, research activities and implementation results. We start with an introduction on the motivations for Segment Routing and an overview of its evolution and standardization. Then, we provide a tutorial on Segment Routing technology, with a focus on the novel SRv6 solution. We discuss the standardization efforts and the patents providing details on the most important documents and mentioning other ongoing activities. We then thoroughly analyze research activities according to a taxonomy. We have identified 8 main categories during our analysis of the current state of play: Monitoring, Traffic Engineering, Failure Recovery, Centrally Controlled Architectures, Path Encoding, Network Programming, Performance Evaluation and Miscellaneous...Comment: SUBMITTED TO IEEE COMMUNICATIONS SURVEYS & TUTORIAL

Project Final Report – FREEDOM ICT-248891

This document is the final publishable summary report of the objective and work carried out within the European Project FREEDOM, ICT-248891.This document is the final publishable summary report of the objective and work carried out within the European Project FREEDOM, ICT-248891.Preprin

Recursive SDN for Carrier Networks

Control planes for global carrier networks should be programmable (so that new functionality can be easily introduced) and scalable (so they can handle the numerical scale and geographic scope of these networks). Neither traditional control planes nor new SDN-based control planes meet both of these goals. In this paper, we propose a framework for recursive routing computations that combines the best of SDN (programmability) and traditional networks (scalability through hierarchy) to achieve these two desired properties. Through simulation on graphs of up to 10,000 nodes, we evaluate our design's ability to support a variety of routing and traffic engineering solutions, while incorporating a fast failure recovery mechanism

Energy Efficiency through Virtual Machine Redistribution in Telecommunication Infrastructure Nodes

Energy efficiency is one of the key factors impacting the green behavior and operational expenses of telecommunication core network operations. This thesis study is aimed for finding out possible technique to reduce energy consumption in telecommunication infrastructure nodes. The study concentrates on traffic management operation (e.g. media stream control, ATM adaptation) within network processors [LeJ03], categorized as control plane. The control plane of the telecommunication infrastructure node is a custom built high performance cluster which consists of multiple GPPs (General Purpose Processor) interconnected by high-speed and low-latency network. Due to application configurations in particular GPP unit and redundancy issues, energy usage is not optimal. In this thesis, our approach is to gain elastic capacity within the control plane cluster to reduce power consumption. This scales down and wakes up certain GPP units depending on traffic load situations. For elasticity, our study moves toward the virtual machine (VM) migration technique in the control plane cluster through system virtualization. The traffic load situation triggers VM migration on demand. Virtual machine live migration brings the benefit of enhanced performance and resiliency of the control plane cluster. We compare the state-of-the-art power aware computing resource scheduling in cluster-based nodes with VM migration technique. Our research does not propose any change in data plane architecture as we are mainly concentrating on the control plane. This study shows, VM migration can be an efficient approach to significantly reduce energy consumption in control plane of cluster-based telecommunication infrastructure nodes without interrupting performance/throughput, while guaranteeing full connectivity and maximum link utilization

Use of locator/identifier separation to improve the future internet routing system

The Internet evolved from its early days of being a small research network to become a critical infrastructure many organizations and individuals rely on. One dimension of this evolution is the continuous growth of the number of participants in the network, far beyond what the initial designers had in mind. While it does work today, it is widely believed that the current design of the global routing system cannot scale to accommodate future challenges. In 2006 an Internet Architecture Board (IAB) workshop was held to develop a shared understanding of the Internet routing system scalability issues faced by the large backbone operators. The participants documented in RFC 4984 their belief that "routing scalability is the most important problem facing the Internet today and must be solved." A potential solution to the routing scalability problem is ending the semantic overloading of Internet addresses, by separating node location from identity. Several proposals exist to apply this idea to current Internet addressing, among which the Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) is the only one already being shipped in production routers. Separating locators from identifiers results in another level of indirection, and introduces a new problem: how to determine location, when the identity is known. The first part of our work analyzes existing proposals for systems that map identifiers to locators and proposes an alternative system, within the LISP ecosystem. We created a large-scale Internet topology simulator and used it to compare the performance of three mapping systems: LISP-DHT, LISP+ALT and the proposed LISP-TREE. We analyzed and contrasted their architectural properties as well. The monitoring projects that supplied Internet routing table growth data over a large timespan inspired us to create LISPmon, a monitoring platform aimed at collecting, storing and presenting data gathered from the LISP pilot network, early in the deployment of the LISP protocol. The project web site and collected data is publicly available and will assist researchers in studying the evolution of the LISP mapping system. We also document how the newly introduced LISP network elements fit into the current Internet, advantages and disadvantages of different deployment options, and how the proposed transition mechanism scenarios could affect the evolution of the global routing system. This work is currently available as an active Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Internet Draft. The second part looks at the problem of efficient one-to-many communications, assuming a routing system that implements the above mentioned locator/identifier split paradigm. We propose a network layer protocol for efficient live streaming. It is incrementally deployable, with changes required only in the same border routers that should be upgraded to support locator/identifier separation. Our proof-of-concept Linux kernel implementation shows the feasibility of the protocol, and our comparison to popular peer-to-peer live streaming systems indicates important savings in inter-domain traffic. We believe LISP has considerable potential of getting adopted, and an important aspect of this work is how it might contribute towards a better mapping system design, by showing the weaknesses of current favorites and proposing alternatives. The presented results are an important step forward in addressing the routing scalability problem described in RFC 4984, and improving the delivery of live streaming video over the Internet

Time-Dependent Pricing for Bandwidth Slicing under Information Asymmetry and Price Discrimination

Due to the bursty nature of Internet traffic, network service providers (NSPs) are forced to expand their network capacity in order to meet the ever-increasing peak-time traffic demand, which is however costly and inefficient. How to shift the traffic demand from peak time to off-peak time is a challenging task for NSPs. In this paper, we study the implementation of time-dependent pricing (TDP) for bandwidth slicing in software-defined cellular networks under information asymmetry and price discrimination. Congestion prices indicating real-time congestion levels of different links are used as a signal to motivate delay-tolerant users to defer their traffic demands. We formulate the joint pricing and bandwidth demand optimization problem as a two-stage Stackelberg leader-follower game. Then, we investigate how to derive the optimal solutions under the scenarios of both complete and incomplete information. We also extend the results from the simplified case of a single congested link to the more complicated case of multiple congested links, where price discrimination is employed to dynamically adjust the price of each congested link in accordance with its real-time congestion level. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed pricing scheme achieves superior performance in increasing the NSP's revenue and reducing the peak-to-average traffic ratio (PATR).This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Number 61971189, the Science and Technology Project of State Grid Corporation of China under Grant Number SGSDDK00KJJS1900405, the Exploration Project of State Key Laboratory of Alternate Electrical Power System with Renewable Energy Sources (North China Electric Power University) under Grant Number LAPS2019-12, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant Number 2020MS001, and the National Key R&D Program of China under Grant Number 2019YFB1704702. This article was presented in part at the International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC’18), Limassol, Cyprus, 2018. The associate editor coordinating the review of this article and approving it for publication was T. He. (Corresponding author: Bo Gu.) Zhenyu Zhou is with the State Key Laboratory of Alternate Electrical Power System With Renewable Energy Sources, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, North China Electric Power University, Beijing 10220