Joint Energy Efficient and QoS-aware Path Allocation and VNF Placement for Service Function Chaining

Service Function Chaining (SFC) allows the forwarding of a traffic flow along a chain of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs, e.g., IDS, firewall, and NAT). Software Defined Networking (SDN) solutions can be used to support SFC reducing the management complexity and the operational costs. One of the most critical issues for the service and network providers is the reduction of energy consumption, which should be achieved without impact to the quality of services. In this paper, we propose a novel resource (re)allocation architecture which enables energy-aware SFC for SDN-based networks. To this end, we model the problems of VNF placement, allocation of VNFs to flows, and flow routing as optimization problems. Thereafter, heuristic algorithms are proposed for the different optimization problems, in order find near-optimal solutions in acceptable times. The performance of the proposed algorithms are numerically evaluated over a real-world topology and various network traffic patterns. The results confirm that the proposed heuristic algorithms provide near optimal solutions while their execution time is applicable for real-life networks.Comment: Extended version of submitted paper - v7 - July 201

Ant-inspired Interaction Networks For Decentralized Vehicular Traffic Congestion Control

Mimicking the autonomous behaviors of animals and their adaptability to changing or foreign environments lead to the development of swarm intelligence techniques such as ant colony optimization (ACO) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) now widely used to tackle a variety of optimization problems. The aim of this dissertation is to develop an alternative swarm intelligence model geared toward decentralized congestion avoidance and to determine qualities of the model suitable for use in a transportation network. A microscopic multi-agent interaction network inspired by insect foraging behaviors, especially ants, was developed and consequently adapted to prioritize the avoidance of congestion, evaluated as perceived density of other agents in the immediate environment extrapolated from the occurrence of direct interactions between agents, while foraging for food outside the base/nest. The agents eschew pheromone trails or other forms of stigmergic communication in favor of these direct interactions whose rate is the primary motivator for the agents\u27 decision making process. The decision making process at the core of the multi-agent interaction network is consequently transferred to transportation networks utilizing vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) for communication between vehicles. Direct interactions are replaced by dedicated short range communications for wireless access in vehicular environments (DSRC/WAVE) messages used for a variety of applications like left turn assist, intersection collision avoidance, or cooperative adaptive cruise control. Each vehicle correlates the traffic on the wireless network with congestion in the transportation network and consequently decides whether to reroute and, if so, what alternate route to take in a decentralized, non-deterministic manner. The algorithm has been shown to increase throughput and decrease mean travel times significantly while not requiring access to centralized infrastructure or up-to-date traffic information

Traffic management with elephant flow detection in software defined networks (SDN)

Multipath routing is to distribute the incoming traffic load among available paths between source and destination hosts. Instead of using the single best path, multipath scheme can avoid the congested path. Equal Cost Multi-Path (ECMP) performs the static traffic splitting based on some tuples of the packet headers. The limitation of ECMP does not consider the network parameters such as bandwidth and delay. Unlike the traditional networks, Software-Defined Network (SDN) has many advantages to support dynamic multipath forwarding due to its special characteristics, such as separation of control and data planes, global centralized control, and programmability of network behavior. In this paper, we propose a new architecture design for dynamic multipath-based traffic management approach in the SDN, which comprises of five components: detecting long (elephant) flow, computing shortest paths, estimating end-to-end delay and bandwidth utilization, calculating least cost path and rerouting traffic flow from the ongoing path to the best path. The simulation environment is created through the usage of Mininet emulator and ONOS controller. The evaluation outcomes show that the proposed traffic management method outperforms the ECMP and reactive forwarding method for both TCP and UDP traffic

The Design and Implementation of a PCIe-based LESS Label Switch

With the explosion of the Internet of Things, the number of smart, embedded devices has grown exponentially in the last decade, with growth projected at a commiserate rate. These devices create strain on the existing infrastructure of the Internet, creating challenges with scalability of routing tables and reliability of packet delivery. Various schemes based on Location-Based Forwarding and ID-based routing have been proposed to solve the aforementioned problems, but thus far, no solution has completely been achieved. This thesis seeks to improve current proposed LORIF routers by designing, implementing, and testing and a PCIe-based LESS switch to process unrouteable packets under the current LESS forwarding engine