Joint Energy Efficient and QoS-aware Path Allocation and VNF Placement for Service Function Chaining

Service Function Chaining (SFC) allows the forwarding of a traffic flow along a chain of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs, e.g., IDS, firewall, and NAT). Software Defined Networking (SDN) solutions can be used to support SFC reducing the management complexity and the operational costs. One of the most critical issues for the service and network providers is the reduction of energy consumption, which should be achieved without impact to the quality of services. In this paper, we propose a novel resource (re)allocation architecture which enables energy-aware SFC for SDN-based networks. To this end, we model the problems of VNF placement, allocation of VNFs to flows, and flow routing as optimization problems. Thereafter, heuristic algorithms are proposed for the different optimization problems, in order find near-optimal solutions in acceptable times. The performance of the proposed algorithms are numerically evaluated over a real-world topology and various network traffic patterns. The results confirm that the proposed heuristic algorithms provide near optimal solutions while their execution time is applicable for real-life networks.Comment: Extended version of submitted paper - v7 - July 201

Probabilistic QoS-aware Placement of VNF chains at the Edge

Deploying IoT-enabled Virtual Network Function (VNF) chains to Cloud-Edge infrastructures requires determining a placement for each VNF that satisfies all set deployment requirements as well as a software-defined routing of traffic flows between consecutive functions that meets all set communication requirements. In this article, we present a declarative solution, EdgeUsher, to the problem of how to best place VNF chains to Cloud-Edge infrastructures. EdgeUsher can determine all eligible placements for a set of VNF chains to a Cloud-Edge infrastructure so to satisfy all of their hardware, IoT, security, bandwidth, and latency requirements. It exploits probability distributions to model the dynamic variations in the available Cloud-Edge infrastructure, and to assess output eligible placements against those variations

Flexible connectivity and QoE/QoS management for 5G networks: the 5G NORMA view

Proceeding of: 2016 IEEE International Conference on Communications Workshops (ICC)The goal envisioned by 5G NORMA is to develop a novel, adaptive and future-proof 5G mobile network architecture. In order to fulfill these requirements, 5G NORMA envisions an extremely flexible architecture to be deployed in a multi-tier distributed data-center. In this paper we focus on the novel mobility management schemes, QoE/QoS, Control and Orchestration mechanisms that are being developed in 5G NORMA. These modules, that follow the software-defined principle, jointly optimize core and access functions. The final result is a modular architecture that adapts to the requirements of very heterogeneous services, while allowing multiple tenants to share network resources among them, providing hence the flexible connectivity needed by future 5G Networks.This work has been performed in the framework of the H2020-ICT-2014-2 project 5G NORMA