2,723 research outputs found
Mitochondrial and nuclear genes suggest that stony corals are monophyletic but most families of stony corals are not (Order Scleractinia, Class Anthozoa, Phylum Cnidaria)
Modern hard corals (Class Hexacorallia; Order Scleractinia) are widely studied because of their fundamental role in reef
building and their superb fossil record extending back to the Triassic. Nevertheless, interpretations of their evolutionary
relationships have been in flux for over a decade. Recent analyses undermine the legitimacy of traditional suborders,
families and genera, and suggest that a non-skeletal sister clade (Order Corallimorpharia) might be imbedded within the
stony corals. However, these studies either sampled a relatively limited array of taxa or assembled trees from heterogeneous
data sets. Here we provide a more comprehensive analysis of Scleractinia (127 species, 75 genera, 17 families) and various
outgroups, based on two mitochondrial genes (cytochrome oxidase I, cytochrome b), with analyses of nuclear genes (ßtubulin,
ribosomal DNA) of a subset of taxa to test unexpected relationships. Eleven of 16 families were found to be
polyphyletic. Strikingly, over one third of all families as conventionally defined contain representatives from the highly
divergent "robust" and "complex" clades. However, the recent suggestion that corallimorpharians are true corals that have
lost their skeletons was not upheld. Relationships were supported not only by mitochondrial and nuclear genes, but also
often by morphological characters which had been ignored or never noted previously. The concordance of molecular
characters and more carefully examined morphological characters suggests a future of greater taxonomic stability, as well as
the potential to trace the evolutionary history of this ecologically important group using fossils
On load balancing via switch migration in software-defined networking
Switch-controller assignment is an essential task in multi-controller software-defined networking. Static assignments are not practical because network dynamics are complex and difficult to predetermine. Since network load varies both in space and time, the mapping of switches to controllers should be adaptive to sudden changes in the network. To that end, switch migration plays an important role in maintaining dynamic switch-controller mapping. Migrating switches from overloaded to underloaded controllers brings flexibility and adaptability to the network but, at the same time, deciding which switches should be migrated to which controllers, while maintaining a balanced load in the network, is a challenging task. This work presents a heuristic approach with solution shaking to solve the switch migration problem. Shift and swap moves are incorporated within a search scheme. Every move is evaluated by how much benefititwillgivetoboththeimmigrationandoutmigrationcontrollers.Theexperimentalresultsshowthat theproposedapproachisabletooutweighthestate-of-artapproaches,andimprovetheloadbalancingresults up to≈ 14% in some scenarios when compared to the most recent approach. In addition, the results show that the proposed work is more robust to controller failure than the state-of-art methods.Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (FCT) - UID/MULTI/00631/2019;info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
Getting the Most Out of Your VNFs: Flexible Assignment of Service Priorities in 5G
Through their computational and forwarding capabilities, 5G networks can
support multiple vertical services. Such services may include several common
virtual (network) functions (VNFs), which could be shared to increase resource
efficiency. In this paper, we focus on the seldom studied VNF-sharing problem,
and decide (i) whether sharing a VNF instance is possible/beneficial or not,
(ii) how to scale virtual machines hosting the VNFs to share, and (iii) the
priorities of the different services sharing the same VNF. These decisions are
made with the aim to minimize the mobile operator's costs while meeting the
verticals' performance requirements. Importantly, we show that the
aforementioned priorities should not be determined a priori on a per-service
basis, rather they should change across VNFs since such additional flexibility
allows for more efficient solutions. We then present an effective methodology
called FlexShare, enabling near-optimal VNF-sharing decisions in polynomial
time. Our performance evaluation, using real-world VNF graphs, confirms the
effectiveness of our approach, which consistently outperforms baseline
solutions using per-service priorities
An Availability-aware SFC placement Algorithm for Fat-Tree Data Centers
Complex inter-connections of virtual functions form the so-called Service Function Chains (SFCs) deployed in the Cloud. Such service chains are used for critical services like e-health or autonomous transportation systems and thus require high availability. Respecting some availability level is hard in general, but it becomes even harder if the operator of the service is not aware of the physical infrastructure that will support the service, which is the case when SFCs are deployed in multi-tenant data centers. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to solve the placement of topology-oblivious SFC demands such that placed SFCs respect availability constraints imposed by the tenant. The algorithm leverages Fat-Tree properties to be computationally doable in an online manner. The simulation results show that it is able to satisfy as many demands as possible by spreading the load between the replicas and enhancing the network resources utilization
DRENCH: A Semi-Distributed Resource Management Framework for NFV based Service Function Chaining
As networks grow in scale and complexity, the use of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and the ability to dynamically instantiate network function instances (NFls) allow us to scale out the network's capabilities in response to demand. At the same time, an increasing number of computing resources, deployed closer to users, as well as network equipment are now capable of performing general-purpose computation for NFV. However, NFV management in the presence of Service Function Chaining (SFC) for arbitrary topologies is a challenging task. In this work we argue for the necessity of an algorithmic resource managementframework that captures the involved tradeoffs of NFls minimum workload, load balancing, and flow path stretch. We introduce DRENCH as a low complexity NFV and flow steering management framework. In DRENCH an NFV market is considered where a centralised SDN controller acts as market orchestrator of NFV nodes. Through competition, NFV nodes make flow steering and NFl instantiation/consolidation decisions. DRENCH design enables third party NFV nodes participation while it can coexist with other NFV management solutions. DRENCH orchestrator parameterisation strikes the right balance between path stretch and NFl load balancing, resulting in significantly lower Flow Completion Times, up to 1Ox less, in some cases
An Availability-aware SFC placement Algorithm for Fat-Tree Data Centers
International audienceComplex inter-connections of virtual functions form the so-called Service Function Chains (SFCs) deployed in the Cloud. Such service chains are used for critical services like e-health or autonomous transportation systems and thus require high availability. Respecting some availability level is hard in general, but it becomes even harder if the operator of the service is not aware of the physical infrastructure that will support the service, which is the case when SFCs are deployed in multi-tenant data centers. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to solve the placement of topology-oblivious SFC demands such that placed SFCs respect availability constraints imposed by the tenant. The algorithm leverages Fat-Tree properties to be computationally doable in an online manner. The simulation results show that it is able to satisfy as many demands as possible by spreading the load between the replicas and enhancing the network resources utilization
CoShare: An Efficient Approach for Redundancy Allocation in NFV
An appealing feature of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is that in an
NFV-based network, a network function (NF) instance may be placed at any node.
On the one hand this offers great flexibility in allocation of redundant
instances, but on the other hand it makes the allocation a unique and difficult
challenge. One particular concern is that there is inherent correlation among
nodes due to the structure of the network, thus requiring special care in this
allocation. To this aim, our novel approach, called CoShare, is proposed.
Firstly, its design takes into consideration the effect of network structural
dependency, which might result in the unavailability of nodes of a network
after failure of a node. Secondly, to efficiently make use of resources,
CoShare proposes the idea of shared reservation, where multiple flows may be
allowed to share the same reserved backup capacity at an NF instance.
Furthermore, CoShare factors in the heterogeneity in nodes, NF instances and
availability requirements of flows in the design. The results from a number of
experiments conducted using realistic network topologies show that the
integration of structural dependency allows meeting availability requirements
for more flows compared to a baseline approach. Specifically, CoShare is able
to meet diverse availability requirements in a resource-efficient manner,
requiring, e.g., up to 85% in some studied cases, less resource overbuild than
the baseline approach that uses the idea of dedicated reservation commonly
adopted for redundancy allocation in NFV
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