55 research outputs found
QoE-Centric Control and Management of Multimedia Services in Software Defined and Virtualized Networks
Multimedia services consumption has increased tremendously since the deployment of 4G/LTE networks. Mobile video services (e.g., YouTube and Mobile TV) on smart devices are expected to continue to grow with the emergence and evolution of future networks such as 5G. The end user’s demand for services with better quality from service providers has triggered a trend towards Quality of Experience (QoE) - centric network management through efficient utilization of network resources. However, existing network technologies are either unable to adapt to diverse changing network conditions or limited in available resources.
This has posed challenges to service providers for provisioning of QoE-centric multimedia services. New networking solutions such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) can provide better solutions in terms of
QoE control and management of multimedia services in emerging and future networks. The features of SDN, such as adaptability, programmability and cost-effectiveness make it suitable for bandwidth-intensive multimedia applications such as live video streaming, 3D/HD video and video gaming. However, the delivery of multimedia services over SDN/NFV networks to achieve optimized QoE, and the overall QoE-centric network resource management remain an open question especially in the advent development of future softwarized networks.
The work in this thesis intends to investigate, design and develop novel approaches for QoE-centric control and management of multimedia services (with a focus on video streaming services) over software defined and virtualized networks.
First, a video quality management scheme based on the traffic intensity under Dynamic Adaptive Video Streaming over HTTP (DASH) using SDN is developed. The proposed scheme can mitigate virtual port queue congestion which may cause
buffering or stalling events during video streaming, thus, reducing the video quality.
A QoE-driven resource allocation mechanism is designed and developed for improving the end user’s QoE for video streaming services. The aim of this approach is to find the best combination of network node functions that can provide an optimized QoE level to end-users through network node cooperation. Furthermore, a novel QoE-centric management scheme is proposed and developed, which utilizes Multipath TCP (MPTCP) and Segment Routing (SR) to enhance QoE for video streaming services over SDN/NFV-based networks. The goal of this strategy is to enable service providers to route network traffic through multiple
disjointed bandwidth-satisfying paths and meet specific service QoE guarantees to the end-users. Extensive experiments demonstrated that the proposed schemes in this work improve the video quality significantly compared with the state-of-the-
art approaches. The thesis further proposes the path protections and link failure-free MPTCP/SR-based architecture that increases survivability, resilience, availability and robustness of future networks. The proposed path protection and dynamic link recovery scheme achieves a minimum time to recover from a failed link and avoids link congestion in softwarized networks
A Service-Defined Approach for Orchestration of Heterogeneous Applications in Cloud/Edge Platforms
Edge Computing is moving resources toward the network borders, thus enabling the deployment of a pool of new applications that benefit from the new distributed infrastructure. However, due to the heterogeneity of such applications, specific orchestration strategies need to be adopted for each deployment request. Each application can potentially require different optimization criteria and may prefer particular reactions upon the occurrence of the same event. This paper presents a Service- Defined approach for orchestrating cloud/edge services in a distributed fashion, where each application can define its own orchestration strategy by means of declarative statements, which are parsed into a Service-Defined Orchestrator (SDO). Moreover, to coordinate the coexistence of a variety of SDOs on the same infrastructure while preserving the resource assignment optimality, we present DRAGON, a Distributed Resource AssiGnment and OrchestratioN algorithm that seeks optimal partitioning of shared resources between different actors. We evaluate the advantages of our novel Service-Defined orchestration approach over some representative edge use cases, as well as measure convergence and performance of DRAGON on a prototype implementation, assessing the benefits compared to conventional orchestration approaches
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
Architectures and Algorithms for Content Delivery in Future Networks
Traditional Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) built with traditional Internet technology are
less and less able to cope with today’s tremendous content growth. Enhancing infrastructures
with storage and computation capabilities may help to remedy the situation. Information-Centric
Networks (ICNs), a proposed future Internet technology, unlike the current Internet, decouple
information from its sources and provide in-network storage. However, content delivery over in-network
storage-enabled networks still faces significant issues, such as the stability and accuracy
of estimated bitrate when using Dynamic Adaptive Streaming (DASH). Still Implementing new
infrastructures with in-network storage can lead to other challenges. For instance, the extensive
deployment of such networks will require a significant upgrade of the installed IP infrastructure.
Furthermore, network slicing enables services and applications with very different characteristics
to co-exist on the same network infrastructure.
Another challenge is that traditional architectures cannot meet future expectations for streaming
in terms of latency and network load when it comes to content, such as 360° videos and immersive
services. In-Network Computing (INC), also known as Computing in the Network (COIN), allows
the computation tasks to be distributed across the network instead of being computed on servers to
guarantee performance. INC is expected to provide lower latency, lower network traffic, and higher
throughput. Implementing infrastructures with in-network computing will help fulfill specific
requirements for streaming 360° video streaming in the future. Therefore, the delivery of 360° video and immersive services can benefit from INC.
This thesis elaborates and addresses the key architectural and algorithmic research challenges
related to content delivery in future networks. To tackle the first challenge, we propose algorithms
for solving the inaccuracy of rate estimation for future CDNs implementation with in-network
storage (a key feature of future networks). An algorithm for implementing in-network storage
in IP settings for CDNs is proposed for the second challenge. Finally, for the third challenge,
we propose an architecture for provisioning INC-enabled slices for 360° video streaming in next-generation
networks. We considered a P4-enabled Software-Defined network (SDN) as the physical
infrastructure and significantly reduced latency and traffic load for video streaming
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