Energy management in communication networks: a journey through modelling and optimization glasses

The widespread proliferation of Internet and wireless applications has produced a significant increase of ICT energy footprint. As a response, in the last five years, significant efforts have been undertaken to include energy-awareness into network management. Several green networking frameworks have been proposed by carefully managing the network routing and the power state of network devices. Even though approaches proposed differ based on network technologies and sleep modes of nodes and interfaces, they all aim at tailoring the active network resources to the varying traffic needs in order to minimize energy consumption. From a modeling point of view, this has several commonalities with classical network design and routing problems, even if with different objectives and in a dynamic context. With most researchers focused on addressing the complex and crucial technological aspects of green networking schemes, there has been so far little attention on understanding the modeling similarities and differences of proposed solutions. This paper fills the gap surveying the literature with optimization modeling glasses, following a tutorial approach that guides through the different components of the models with a unified symbolism. A detailed classification of the previous work based on the modeling issues included is also proposed

Intelligent Network Infrastructures: New Functional Perspectives on Leveraging Future Internet Services

The Internet experience of the 21st century is by far very different from that of the early '80s. The Internet has adapted itself to become what it really is today, a very successful business platform of global scale. As every highly successful technology, the Internet has suffered from a natural process of ossification. Over the last 30 years, the technical solutions adopted to leverage emerging applications can be divided in two categories. First, the addition of new functionalities either patching existing protocols or adding new upper layers. Second, accommodating traffic grow with higher bandwidth links. Unfortunately, this approach is not suitable to provide the proper ground for a wide gamma of new applications. To be deployed, these future Internet applications require from the network layer advanced capabilities that the TCP/IP stack and its derived protocols can not provide by design in a robust, scalable fashion. NGNs (Next Generation Networks) on top of intelligent telecommunication infrastructures are being envisioned to support future Internet Services. This thesis contributes with three proposals to achieve this ambitious goal. The first proposal presents a preliminary architecture to allow NGNs to seamlessly request advanced services from layer 1 transport networks, such as QoS guaranteed point-to-multipoint circuits. This architecture is based on virtualization techniques applied to layer 1 networks, and hides from NGNs all complexities of interdomain provisioning. Moreover, the economic aspects involved were also considered, making the architecture attractive to carriers. The second contribution regards a framework to develop DiffServ-MPLS capable networks based exclusively on open source software and commodity PCs. The developed DiffServ-MPLS flexible software router was designed to allow NGN prototyping, that make use of pseudo virtual circuits and assured QoS as a starting point of development. The third proposal presents a state of the art routing and wavelength assignment algorithm for photonic networks. This algorithm considers physical layer impairments to 100% guarantee the requested QoS profile, even in case of single network failures. A number of novel techniques were applied to offer lower blocking probability when compared with recent proposed algorithms, without impacting on setup delay time

Brokering SLAs for end-to-end QoS in cloud computing

In this paper, we present a brokering logic for providing precise end-to-end QoS levels to cloud applications distributed across a number of different business actors, such as network service providers (NSP) and cloud providers (CSP). The broker composes a number of available offerings from each provider, in a way that respects the QoS application constraints while minimizing costs incurred by cloud consumers. Copyright © 2014 SCITEPRESS - Science and Technology Publications

A Survey on the Path Computation Element (PCE) Architecture

Quality of Service-enabled applications and services rely on Traffic Engineering-based (TE) Label Switched Paths (LSP) established in core networks and controlled by the GMPLS control plane. Path computation process is crucial to achieve the desired TE objective. Its actual effectiveness depends on a number of factors. Mechanisms utilized to update topology and TE information, as well as the latency between path computation and resource reservation, which is typically distributed, may affect path computation efficiency. Moreover, TE visibility is limited in many network scenarios, such as multi-layer, multi-domain and multi-carrier networks, and it may negatively impact resource utilization. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has promoted the Path Computation Element (PCE) architecture, proposing a dedicated network entity devoted to path computation process. The PCE represents a flexible instrument to overcome visibility and distributed provisioning inefficiencies. Communications between path computation clients (PCC) and PCEs, realized through the PCE Protocol (PCEP), also enable inter-PCE communications offering an attractive way to perform TE-based path computation among cooperating PCEs in multi-layer/domain scenarios, while preserving scalability and confidentiality. This survey presents the state-of-the-art on the PCE architecture for GMPLS-controlled networks carried out by research and standardization community. In this work, packet (i.e., MPLS-TE and MPLS-TP) and wavelength/spectrum (i.e., WSON and SSON) switching capabilities are the considered technological platforms, in which the PCE is shown to achieve a number of evident benefits

Using GRASP and GA to design resilient and cost-effective IP/MPLS networks

The main objective of this thesis is to find good quality solutions for representative instances of the problem of designing a resilient and low cost IP/MPLS network, to be deployed over an existing optical transport network. This research is motivated by two complementary real-world application cases, which comprise the most important commercial and academic networks of Uruguay. To achieve this goal, we performed an exhaustive analysis of existing models and technologies. From all of them we took elements that were contrasted with the particular requirements of our counterparts. We highlight among these requirements, the need of getting solutions transparently implementable over a heterogeneous network environment, which limit us to use widely standardized features of related technologies. We decided to create new models more suitable to fit these needs. These models are intrinsically hard to solve (NP-Hard). Thus we developed metaheuristic based algorithms to find solutions to these real-world instances. Evolutionary Algorithms and Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedures obtained the best results. As it usually happens, real-world planning problems are surrounded by uncertainty. Therefore, we have worked closely with our counterparts to reduce the fuzziness upon data to a set of representative cases. They were combined with different strategies of design to get to scenarios, which were translated into instances of these problems. Finally, the algorithms were fed with this information, and from their outcome we derived our results and conclusions

Survivability aspects of future optical backbone networks

In huidige glasvezelnetwerken kan een enkele vezel een gigantische hoeveelheid data dragen, ruwweg het equivalent van 25 miljoen gelijktijdige telefoongesprekken. Hierdoor zullen netwerkstoringen, zoals breuken van een glasvezelkabel, de communicatie van een groot aantal eindgebruikers verstoren. Netwerkoperatoren kiezen er dan ook voor om hun netwerk zo te bouwen dat zulke grote storingen automatisch opgevangen worden. Dit proefschrift spitst zich toe op twee aspecten rond de overleefbaarheid in toekomstige optische netwerken. De eerste doelstelling die beoogd wordt is het tot stand brengen vanrobuuste dataverbindingen over meerdere netwerken. Door voldoende betrouwbare verbindingen tot stand te brengen over een infrastructuur die niet door een enkele entiteit wordt beheerd kan men bv. weredwijd Internettelevisie van hoge kwaliteit aanbieden. De bestudeerde oplossing heeft niet enkel tot doel om deze zeer betrouwbare verbinding te berekenen, maar ook om dit te bewerkstelligen met een minimum aan gebruikte netwerkcapaciteit. De tweede doelstelling was om een antwoord te formuleren om de vraag hoe het toepassen van optische schakelsystemen gebaseerd op herconfigureerbare optische multiplexers een impact heeft op de overleefbaarheid van een optisch netwerk. Bij lagere volumes hebben optisch geschakelde netwerken weinig voordeel van dergelijke gesofistikeerde methoden. Elektronisch geschakelde netwerken vertonen geen afhankelijkheid van het datavolume en hebben altijd baat bij optimalisatie

Differentiated quality-of-recovery and quality-of-protection in survivable WDM mesh networks

In the modern telecommunication business, there is a need to provide different Quality-of-Recovery (QoR) and Quality-of-Protection (QoP) classes in order to accommodate as many customers as possible, and to optimize the protection capacity cost. Prevalent protection methods to provide specific QoS related to protection are based on pre-defined shape protection structures (topologies), e.g., p -cycles and p -trees. Although some of these protection patterns are known to provide a good trade-off among the different protection parameters, their shapes can limit their deployment in some specific network conditions, e.g., a constrained link spare capacity budget and traffic distribution. In this thesis, we propose to re-think the design process of protection schemes in survivable WDM networks by adopting a hew design approach where the shapes of the protection structures are decided based on the targeted QoR and QoP guarantees, and not the reverse. We focus on the degree of pre-configuration of the protection topologies, and use fully and partially pre-cross connected p -structures, and dynamically cross connected p -structures. In QoR differentiation, we develop different approaches for pre-configuring the protection capacity in order to strike different balances between the protection cost and the availability requirements in the network; while in the QoP differentiation, we focus on the shaping of the protection structures to provide different grades of protection including single and dual-link failure protection. The new research directions proposed and developed in this thesis are intended to help network operators to effectively support different Quality-of-Recovery and Quality-of-Protection classes. All new ideas have been translated into mathematical models for which we propose practical and efficient design methods in order to optimize the inherent cost to the different designs of protection schemes. Furthermore, we establish a quantitative relation between the degree of pre-configuration of the protection structures and their costs in terms of protection capacity. Our most significant contributions are the design and development of Pre-Configured Protection Structure (p-structure) and Pre-Configured Protection Extended-Tree (p -etree) based schemes. Thanks to the column generation modeling and solution approaches, we propose a new design approach of protection schemes where we deploy just enough protection to provide different quality of recovery and protection classe