SDN-based virtual machine management for cloud data centers

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging paradigm to logically centralize the network control plane and automate the configuration of individual network elements. At the same time, in Cloud Data Centers (DCs), even though network and server resources converge over the same infrastructure and typically over a single administrative entity, disjoint control mechanisms are used for their respective management. In this paper, we propose a unified server-network control mechanism for converged ICT environments. We present a SDN-based orchestration framework for live Virtual Machine (VM) management where server hypervisors exploit temporal network information to migrate VMs and minimize the network-wide communication cost of the resulting traffic dynamics. A prototype implementation is presented and Mininet is used to evaluate the impact of diverse orchestration algorithms

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

Distributed algorithms for green IP networks2012 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM Workshops

We propose a novel distributed approach to exploit sleep mode capabilities of links in an Internet Service Provider network. Differently from other works, neither a central controller, nor the knowledge of the current traffic matrix is assumed, favoring a major step towards making sleep mode enabled networks practical in the current Internet architecture. Our algorithms are able to automatically adapt the state of network links to the actual traffic in the network. Moreover, the required input parameters are intuitive and easy to set. Extensive simulations that consider a real network and traffic demand prove that our algorithms are able to follow the daily variation of traffic, reducing energy consumption up to 70% during off peak time, with little overheads and while guaranteeing Quality of Service constraint

Scalable traffic-aware virtual machine management for cloud data centers

Virtual Machine (VM) management is a powerful mechanism for providing elastic services over Cloud Data Centers (DC)s. At the same time, the resulting network congestion has been repeatedly reported as the main bottleneck in DCs, even when the overall resource utilization of the infrastructure remains low. However, most current VM management strategies are traffic-agnostic, while the few that are traffic-aware only concern a static initial allocation, ignore bandwidth oversubscription, or do not scale. In this paper we present S-CORE, a scalable VM migration algorithm to dynamically reallocate VMs to servers while minimizing the overall communication footprint of active traffic flows. We formulate the aggregate VM communication as an optimization problem and we then define a novel distributed migration scheme that iteratively adapts to dynamic traffic changes. Through extensive simulation and implementation results, we show that S-CORE achieves significant (up to 87%) communication cost reduction while incurring minimal overhead and downtime

Survey of Consistent Network Updates

Computer networks have become a critical infrastructure. Designing dependable computer networks however is challenging, as such networks should not only meet strict requirements in terms of correctness, availability, and performance, but they should also be flexible enough to support fast updates, e.g., due to a change in the security policy, an increasing traffic demand, or a failure. The advent of Software-Defined Networks (SDNs) promises to provide such flexiblities, allowing to update networks in a fine-grained manner, also enabling a more online traffic engineering. In this paper, we present a structured survey of mechanisms and protocols to update computer networks in a fast and consistent manner. In particular, we identify and discuss the different desirable update consistency properties a network should provide, the algorithmic techniques which are needed to meet these consistency properties, their implications on the speed and costs at which updates can be performed. We also discuss the relationship of consistent network update problems to classic algorithmic optimization problems. While our survey is mainly motivated by the advent of Software-Defined Networks (SDNs), the fundamental underlying problems are not new, and we also provide a historical perspective of the subject

Scalable Traffic-Aware Virtual Machine Management for Cloud Data Centers

Virtual Machine (VM) management is a powerful mechanism for providing elastic services over Cloud Data Centers (DC)s. At the same time, the resulting network congestion has been repeatedly reported as the main bottleneck in DCs, even when the overall resource utilization of the infrastructure remains low. However, most current VM management strategies are traffic-agnostic, while the few that are traffic-aware only concern a static initial allocation, ignore bandwidth oversubscription, or do not scale. In this paper we present S-CORE, a scalable VM migration algorithm to dynamically reallocate VMs to servers while minimizing the overall communication footprint of active traffic flows. We formulate the aggregate VM communication as an optimization problem and we then define a novel distributed migration scheme that iteratively adapts to dynamic traffic changes. Through extensive simulation and implementation results, we show that S-CORE achieves significant (up to 87%) communication cost reduction while incurring minimal overhead and downtime. Index Terms—Virtual Machine, Migration, Consolidation, Communication Cost, Scalable, Traffic-Aware, Data Center Networ