Clustering algorithms for dynamic adaptation of service function chains

Network function virtualization is a pillar-stone of today’s network architectures as it offers better management and elasticity and allows also a flexible maintenance of services running on shared resources over cloud environments. Network functions traditionally hosted on dedicated hardware are now provided over software based components that might run either on virtual machines or on containers. The major advantage of this transition is that it makes the deployment of new services easier while optimizing the management and administration of network architectures. It is much easier to spin up a new virtual machine/container hosting a network function or a specific application described as a service function chain, than to deploy a new hardware based equipment and checking its compatibility with the rest of the architecture. With all the advantages that this new paradigm offers comes a set of challenges related mainly to: 1) optimizing the resource consumption on the shared infrastructure 2) making the best decision of placing the virtual functions that respects at the same time clients’ requirements and also leverages the available resources on the substrate network in terms of different metrics (e.g., CPU, memory, latency, bandwidth). This aspect of Network Function Virtualization-NFV and Service Function Chains-SFC placement have been treated in so many research works that propose approaches ensuring optimal placement and chaining of VNFs in virtualized networks, but as the adoption of these technologies gets more important in real network setups, and given the strict restrictions of today’s’ applications (e.g. latency highly-sensitive applications, or availability highly-sensitive service, etc.), it is always important to consider all the parameters impacting the network management in cloud environments. In this research project, we develop new approaches for placement and chaining of virtual network functions in cloud-based environments. The first approach allows forming on demand clusters of servers deployed in a physical infrastructure. These servers are grouped according to their similar attributes (e.g., CPU-intensive server, energy-efficient server, etc). This process is a proactive measure to ensure that SFCs are hosted in servers that meet their specific metrics requirements (CPU, memory, disk, etc.). It employs a meta-heuristic called CRO (Chemical Reaction Optimization) to decide of the best VNF placement guaranteeing optimal resource consumption in terms of CPU / memory. We employ CRO also to ensure the lowest latencies during the routing between the different VNFs. In fact, the E2E delay is an important aspect to consider, as most current applications require low latencies and shortest run times. In the second approach, the clusters are formed using algorithms based on meta-heuristics, including the CRO, allowing to improve the quality of clusters formed in terms of similarity, density and modularity

Energy and Performance: Management of Virtual Machines: Provisioning, Placement, and Consolidation

Cloud computing is a new computing paradigm that offers scalable storage and compute resources to users on demand through Internet. Public cloud providers operate large-scale data centers around the world to handle a large number of users request. However, data centers consume an immense amount of electrical energy that can lead to high operating costs and carbon emissions. One of the most common and effective method in order to reduce energy consumption is Dynamic Virtual Machines Consolidation (DVMC) enabled by the virtualization technology. DVMC dynamically consolidates Virtual Machines (VMs) into the minimum number of active servers and then switches the idle servers into a power-saving mode to save energy. However, maintaining the desired level of Quality-of-Service (QoS) between data centers and their users is critical for satisfying users’ expectations concerning performance. Therefore, the main challenge is to minimize the data center energy consumption while maintaining the required QoS. This thesis address this challenge by presenting novel DVMC approaches to reduce the energy consumption of data centers and improve resource utilization under workload independent quality of service constraints. These approaches can be divided into three main categories: heuristic, meta-heuristic and machine learning. Our first contribution is a heuristic algorithm for solving the DVMC problem. The algorithm uses a linear regression-based prediction model to detect over-loaded servers based on the historical utilization data. Then it migrates some VMs from the over-loaded servers to avoid further performance degradations. Moreover, our algorithm consolidates VMs on fewer number of server for energy saving. The second and third contributions are two novel DVMC algorithms based on the Reinforcement Learning (RL) approach. RL is interesting for highly adaptive and autonomous management in dynamic environments. For this reason, we use RL to solve two main sub-problems in VM consolidation. The first sub-problem is the server power mode detection (sleep or active). The second sub-problem is to find an effective solution for server status detection (overloaded or non-overloaded). The fourth contribution of this thesis is an online optimization meta-heuristic algorithm called Ant Colony System-based Placement Optimization (ACS-PO). ACS is a suitable approach for VM consolidation due to the ease of parallelization, that it is close to the optimal solution, and its polynomial worst-case time complexity. The simulation results show that ACS-PO provides substantial improvement over other heuristic algorithms in reducing energy consumption, the number of VM migrations, and performance degradations. Our fifth contribution is a Hierarchical VM management (HiVM) architecture based on a three-tier data center topology which is very common use in data centers. HiVM has the ability to scale across many thousands of servers with energy efficiency. Our sixth contribution is a Utilization Prediction-aware Best Fit Decreasing (UP-BFD) algorithm. UP-BFD can avoid SLA violations and needless migrations by taking into consideration the current and predicted future resource requirements for allocation, consolidation, and placement of VMs. Finally, the seventh and the last contribution is a novel Self-Adaptive Resource Management System (SARMS) in data centers. To achieve scalability, SARMS uses a hierarchical architecture that is partially inspired from HiVM. Moreover, SARMS provides self-adaptive ability for resource management by dynamically adjusting the utilization thresholds for each server in data centers.Siirretty Doriast

Learning from AI : new trends in database technology

Recently some researchers in the areas of database data modelling and knowledge representations in artificial intelligence have recognized that they share many common goals. In this survey paper we show the relationship between database and artificial intelligence research. We show that there has been a tendency for data models to incorporate more modelling techniques developed for knowledge representations in artificial intelligence as the desire to incorporate more application oriented semantics, user friendliness, and flexibility has increased. Increasing the semantics of the representation is the key to capturing the "reality" of the database environment, increasing user friendliness, and facilitating the support of multiple, possibly conflicting, user views of the information contained in a database

Network Analysis on Incomplete Structures.

Over the past decade, networks have become an increasingly popular abstraction for problems in the physical, life, social and information sciences. Network analysis can be used to extract insights into an underlying system from the structure of its network representation. One of the challenges of applying network analysis is the fact that networks do not always have an observed and complete structure. This dissertation focuses on the problem of imputation and/or inference in the presence of incomplete network structures. I propose four novel systems, each of which, contain a module that involves the inference or imputation of an incomplete network that is necessary to complete the end task. I first propose EdgeBoost, a meta-algorithm and framework that repeatedly applies a non-deterministic link predictor to improve the efficacy of community detection algorithms on networks with missing edges. On average EdgeBoost improves performance of existing algorithms by 7% on artificial data and 17% on ego networks collected from Facebook. The second system, Butterworth, identifies a social network user's topic(s) of interests and automatically generates a set of social feed ``rankers'' that enable the user to see topic specific sub-feeds. Butterworth uses link prediction to infer the missing semantics between members of a user's social network in order to detect topical clusters embedded in the network structure. For automatically generated topic lists, Butterworth achieves an average top-10 precision of 78%, as compared to a time-ordered baseline of 45%. Next, I propose Dobby, a system for constructing a knowledge graph of user-defined keyword tags. Leveraging a sparse set of labeled edges, Dobby trains a supervised learning algorithm to infer the hypernym relationships between keyword tags. Dobby was evaluated by constructing a knowledge graph of LinkedIn's skills dataset, achieving an average precision of 85% on a set of human labeled hypernym edges between skills. Lastly, I propose Lobbyback, a system that automatically identifies clusters of documents that exhibit text reuse and generates ``prototypes'' that represent a canonical version of text shared between the documents. Lobbyback infers a network structure in a corpus of documents and uses community detection in order to extract the document clusters.PhDComputer Science and EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133443/1/mattburg_1.pd

Community Detection in Networks using Bio-inspired Optimization: Latest Developments, New Results and Perspectives with a Selection of Recent Meta-Heuristics

Detecting groups within a set of interconnected nodes is a widely addressed prob- lem that can model a diversity of applications. Unfortunately, detecting the opti- mal partition of a network is a computationally demanding task, usually conducted by means of optimization methods. Among them, randomized search heuristics have been proven to be efficient approaches. This manuscript is devoted to pro- viding an overview of community detection problems from the perspective of bio-inspired computation. To this end, we first review the recent history of this research area, placing emphasis on milestone studies contributed in the last five years. Next, we present an extensive experimental study to assess the performance of a selection of modern heuristics over weighted directed network instances. Specifically, we combine seven global search heuristics based on two different similarity metrics and eight heterogeneous search operators designed ad-hoc. We compare our methods with six different community detection techniques over a benchmark of 17 Lancichinetti-Fortunato-Radicchi network instances. Ranking statistics of the tested algorithms reveal that the proposed methods perform com- petitively, but the high variability of the rankings leads to the main conclusion: no clear winner can be declared. This finding aligns with community detection tools available in the literature that hinge on a sequential application of different algorithms in search for the best performing counterpart. We end our research by sharing our envisioned status of this area, for which we identify challenges and opportunities which should stimulate research efforts in years to come

Solutions to Detect and Analyze Online Radicalization : A Survey

Online Radicalization (also called Cyber-Terrorism or Extremism or Cyber-Racism or Cyber- Hate) is widespread and has become a major and growing concern to the society, governments and law enforcement agencies around the world. Research shows that various platforms on the Internet (low barrier to publish content, allows anonymity, provides exposure to millions of users and a potential of a very quick and widespread diffusion of message) such as YouTube (a popular video sharing website), Twitter (an online micro-blogging service), Facebook (a popular social networking website), online discussion forums and blogosphere are being misused for malicious intent. Such platforms are being used to form hate groups, racist communities, spread extremist agenda, incite anger or violence, promote radicalization, recruit members and create virtual organi- zations and communities. Automatic detection of online radicalization is a technically challenging problem because of the vast amount of the data, unstructured and noisy user-generated content, dynamically changing content and adversary behavior. There are several solutions proposed in the literature aiming to combat and counter cyber-hate and cyber-extremism. In this survey, we review solutions to detect and analyze online radicalization. We review 40 papers published at 12 venues from June 2003 to November 2011. We present a novel classification scheme to classify these papers. We analyze these techniques, perform trend analysis, discuss limitations of existing techniques and find out research gaps

Layered evaluation of interactive adaptive systems : framework and formative methods

Peer reviewedPostprin