Flow Delegation: Flow Table Capacity Bottleneck Mitigation for Software-defined Networks

This dissertation introduces flow delegation, a novel concept to deal with flow table capacity bottlenecks in Software-defined Networks (SDNs). Such bottlenecks occur when SDN switches provide insufficient flow table capacity which can lead to performance degradation and/or network failures. Flow delegation addresses this well-known problem by automatically relocating flow rules from a bottlenecked switch to neighboring switches with spare capacity. Different from existing work, this new approach can be used on-demand in a transparent fashion, i.e., without changes to the network applications or other parts of the infrastructure. The thesis presents a system design and architecture capable of dealing with the numerous practical challenges associated with flow delegation, introduces suitable algorithms to efficiently mitigate bottlenecks taking future knowledge and multiple objectives into account and studies feasibility, performance, overhead, and scalability of the new approach covering different scenarios

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse