Management and Service-aware Networking Architectures (MANA) for Future Internet Position Paper: System Functions, Capabilities and Requirements

Future Internet (FI) research and development threads have recently been gaining momentum all over the world and as such the international race to create a new generation Internet is in full swing: GENI, Asia Future Internet, Future Internet Forum Korea, European Union Future Internet Assembly (FIA). This is a position paper identifying the research orientation with a time horizon of 10 years, together with the key challenges for the capabilities in the Management and Service-aware Networking Architectures (MANA) part of the Future Internet (FI) allowing for parallel and federated Internet(s)

Towards delay-aware container-based Service Function Chaining in Fog Computing

Recently, the fifth-generation mobile network (5G) is getting significant attention. Empowered by Network Function Virtualization (NFV), 5G networks aim to support diverse services coming from different business verticals (e.g. Smart Cities, Automotive, etc). To fully leverage on NFV, services must be connected in a specific order forming a Service Function Chain (SFC). SFCs allow mobile operators to benefit from the high flexibility and low operational costs introduced by network softwarization. Additionally, Cloud computing is evolving towards a distributed paradigm called Fog Computing, which aims to provide a distributed cloud infrastructure by placing computational resources close to end-users. However, most SFC research only focuses on Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) use cases where mobile operators aim to deploy services close to end-users. Bi-directional communication between Edges and Cloud are not considered in MEC, which in contrast is highly important in a Fog environment as in distributed anomaly detection services. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an SFC controller to optimize the placement of service chains in Fog environments, specifically tailored for Smart City use cases. Our approach has been validated on the Kubernetes platform, an open-source orchestrator for the automatic deployment of micro-services. Our SFC controller has been implemented as an extension to the scheduling features available in Kubernetes, enabling the efficient provisioning of container-based SFCs while optimizing resource allocation and reducing the end-to-end (E2E) latency. Results show that the proposed approach can lower the network latency up to 18% for the studied use case while conserving bandwidth when compared to the default scheduling mechanism

System Support for Managing Invalid Bindings

Context-aware adaptation is a central aspect of pervasive computing applications, enabling them to adapt and perform tasks based on contextual information. One of the aspects of context-aware adaptation is reconfiguration in which bindings are created between application component and remote services in order to realize new behaviour in response to contextual information. Various research efforts provide reconfiguration support and allow the development of adaptive context-aware applications from high-level specifications, but don't consider failure conditions that might arise during execution of such applications, making bindings between application and remote services invalid. To this end, we propose and implement our design approach to reconfiguration to manage invalid bindings. The development and modification of adaptive context-aware applications is a complex task, and an issue of an invalidity of bindings further complicates development efforts. To reduce the development efforts, our approach provides an application-transparent solution where the issue of the invalidity of bindings is handled by our system, Policy-Based Contextual Reconfiguration and Adaptation (PCRA), not by an application developer. In this paper, we present and describe our approach to managing invalid bindings and compare it with other approaches to this problem. We also provide performance evaluation of our approach