Orchestration and Scheduling of Resources in Softwarized Networks

The Fifth Generation (5G) era is touted as the next generation of mobile networks that will unleash new services and network capabilities, opening up a whole new line of businesses recognized by a top-notch Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) empowered by many recent advancements in network softwarization and providing an innovative on-demand service provisioning on a shared underlying network infrastructure. 5G networks will support the immerse explosion of the Internet of Things (IoT) incurring an expected growth of billions of connected IoT devices by 2020, providing a wide range of services spanning from low-cost sensor-based metering services to low-latency communication services touching health, education and automotive sectors among others. Mobile operators are striving to find a cost effective network solution that will enable them to continuously and automatically upgrade their networks based on their ever growing customers demands in the quest of fulfilling the new rising opportunities of offering novel services empowered by the many emerging IoT devices. Thus, departing from the shortfalls of legacy hardware (i.e., high cost, difficult management and update, etc.) and learning from the different advantages of virtualization technologies which enabled the sharing of computing resources in a cloud environment, mobile operators started to leverage the idea of network softwarization through several emerging technologies. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) promises an ultimate Capital Expenditures (CAPEX) reduction and high flexibility in resource provisioning and service delivery through replacing hardware equipment by software. Software Defined Network (SDN) offers network and mobile operators programmable traffic management and delivery. These technologies will enable the launch of Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) paradigm that promises to complete the 5G networks requirements in providing low-latency services by bringing the computing resources to the edge of the network, in close vicinity of the users, hence, assisting the limited capabilities of their IoT devices in delivering their needed services. By leveraging network softwarization, these technologies will initiate a tremendous re-design of current networks that will be transformed to self-managed, software-based networks exploiting multiple benefits ranging from flexibility, programmability, automation, elasticity among others. This dissertation attempts to elaborate and address key challenges related to enabling the re-design of current networks to support a smooth integration of the NFV and MEC technologies. This thesis provides a profound understanding and novel contributions in resource and service provisioning and scheduling towards enabling efficient resource and network utilization of the underlying infrastructure by leveraging several optimization and game theoretic techniques. In particular, we first, investigate the interplay existing between network function mapping, traffic routing and Network Service (NS) scheduling in NFV-based networks and present a Column Generation (CG) decomposition method to solve the problem with considerable runtime improvement over mathematical-based formulations. Given the increasing interest in providing low-latency services and the correlation existing between this objective and the goal of network operators in maximizing their network admissibility through efficiently utilizing their network resources, we revisit the latter problem and tackle it under different assumptions and objectives. Given its complexity, we present a novel game theoretic approach that is able to provide a bounded solution of the problem. Further, we extend our work to the network edge where we promote network elasticity and alleviate virtualization technologies by addressing the problem of task offloading and scheduling along with the IoT application resource allocation problem. Given the complexity of the problem, we propose a Logic-Based Benders (LBBD) decomposition method to efficiently solve it to optimality

QoE management of multimedia streaming services in future networks : a tutorial and survey

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Security Threats in Software Defined Mobile Clouds (SDMC)

Future Internet comprises of emerging ICT mega-trends (e.g., mobile, social, cloud, and big data) commands new challenges like ubiquitous accessibility, high bandwidth, and dynamic management to meet the data tsunami requirements. In the recent years, the rapid growth of smartphone business is highly evidenced due to its versatile usage irrespective of location, personality or context. Despite of increased smartphone usage, exploiting its full potential becomes very difficult owing to its typical issues such as resource scarcity, mobility and more prominently the security. Software Defined Networking (SDN), an emerging wireless network paradigm can make use of rich mobile cloud functionalities such as traffic management, load balancing, routing, and firewall configuration over physical abstraction of control planes from data planes. Hence SDN leads to a clear roadmap to Software Security control in Mobile Clouds (SDMC). Further it can be extended to a level of Security prevention. To address in this direction, this paper surveys the relevant backgrounds of the existing state-of-art works to come up with all possible SDMC threats and its countermeasures

Security, Performance and Energy Trade-offs of Hardware-assisted Memory Protection Mechanisms

The deployment of large-scale distributed systems, e.g., publish-subscribe platforms, that operate over sensitive data using the infrastructure of public cloud providers, is nowadays heavily hindered by the surging lack of trust toward the cloud operators. Although purely software-based solutions exist to protect the confidentiality of data and the processing itself, such as homomorphic encryption schemes, their performance is far from being practical under real-world workloads. The performance trade-offs of two novel hardware-assisted memory protection mechanisms, namely AMD SEV and Intel SGX - currently available on the market to tackle this problem, are described in this practical experience. Specifically, we implement and evaluate a publish/subscribe use-case and evaluate the impact of the memory protection mechanisms and the resulting performance. This paper reports on the experience gained while building this system, in particular when having to cope with the technical limitations imposed by SEV and SGX. Several trade-offs that provide valuable insights in terms of latency, throughput, processing time and energy requirements are exhibited by means of micro- and macro-benchmarks.Comment: European Commission Project: LEGaTO - Low Energy Toolset for Heterogeneous Computing (EC-H2020-780681

Enabling Scalable and Sustainable Softwarized 5G Environments

The fifth generation of telecommunication systems (5G) is foreseen to play a fundamental role in our socio-economic growth by supporting various and radically new vertical applications (such as Industry 4.0, eHealth, Smart Cities/Electrical Grids, to name a few), as a one-fits-all technology that is enabled by emerging softwarization solutions \u2013 specifically, the Fog, Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC), Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigms. Notwithstanding the notable potential of the aforementioned technologies, a number of open issues still need to be addressed to ensure their complete rollout. This thesis is particularly developed towards addressing the scalability and sustainability issues in softwarized 5G environments through contributions in three research axes: a) Infrastructure Modeling and Analytics, b) Network Slicing and Mobility Management, and c) Network/Services Management and Control. The main contributions include a model-based analytics approach for real-time workload profiling and estimation of network key performance indicators (KPIs) in NFV infrastructures (NFVIs), as well as a SDN-based multi-clustering approach to scale geo-distributed virtual tenant networks (VTNs) and to support seamless user/service mobility; building on these, solutions to the problems of resource consolidation, service migration, and load balancing are also developed in the context of 5G. All in all, this generally entails the adoption of Stochastic Models, Mathematical Programming, Queueing Theory, Graph Theory and Team Theory principles, in the context of Green Networking, NFV and SDN

Optimizing the Cloud Resources, Bandwidth and Deployment Costs in Multi-Providers Network Function Virtualization Environment

The introduction of network function virtualization (NFV) leads to a new business model in which the Telecommunication Service Provider needs to rent cloud resources to infrastructure provider (InP) at prices as low as possible. Lowest prices can be achieved if the cloud resources can be rented in advance by allocating long-term virtual machines (VM). This is in contrast with the short-term VMs that are rented on demand and have higher costs. For this reason, we propose a proactive solution in which the cloud resource rent is planned in advance based on peak traffic knowledge. We illustrate the problem of determining the cloud resources in cloud infrastructures managed by different InPs and so as to minimize the sum of cloud resource, bandwidth and deployment costs. We formulate an integer linear problem (ILP) and due to its complexity, we introduce an efficient heuristic approach allowing for a remarkable computational complexity reduction. We compare our solution to a reactive solution in which the cloud resources are rented on demand and dimensioned according to the current traffic. Though the proposed proactive solution needs more cloud and bandwidth resources due to its peak allocation, its total resources cost may be lower than the one achieved when a reactive solution is applied. That is a consequence of the higher cost of short-term VMs. For instance, when a reactive solution is applied with traffic variation times of ten minutes, our proactive solution allows for lower total costs when the long-term VM rent is lower than the short-term VM one by 33%

Contextually and identity aware 5G services

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University LondonThe fifth generation (5G) mobile networks aim to be ten times faster than the existing 4G connection, whilst providing low latency, and flexibility. Hence, various alterations are planned to the existing network infrastructure to be able to reach the 5G expected performance levels. The main technologies that were used, to ensure high performance, flexible network, and efficient resource allocation, are Software Defined Network and Network Function Virtualization. As these technologies are replacing the device-based architecture with, a service-based architecture. This thesis provides a design of location database interactive web interface and interactive mobile application. The implementation of real time video streaming location server, the streaming system's performance parameters demonstrated a high level of QoS (0.07ms jitter and 9.53ms delay). In regard to experimental examination, it measured the localisation coverage, accuracy measurements and a highly scalable security solution. The localisation coverage and accuracy measurements were achieved through the mmWave and VLC link transmitters. The proposed simulated annealing algorithm aimed at data optimisation for location measurements accuracy showed results of the average location error of x and y which showed significant improvement from x= 22.5 and y=21.6 to x=11.09 and y= 11.63. The proposed indoor location security solution showed significant results, as it provides a high scalability solution using the VNF. The solution showed that it was not 100% effective, as some of the fake discover packets still reached the DHCP server. This was due to the high load of traffic passing through the network. Nonetheless, 90% of the fake DHCP discover packets never reached the DHCP server because the scripts began blocking all fake discover packets after realising it was an attack. This conveys that the proposed system was able to run successfully without crashing or overloading the controller. Overall, the main challenges facing 5G have been addressed with their proposed solutions, which showed promising results. Conclusively showing that there is a lot more space for technological advancements to support the future of mobile networks.European Union’s Horizon 2020 research program - the Internet of Radio-Light (IoRL) project H2020-ICT 761992

Provably Efficient Algorithms for Placement of Service Function Chains with Ordering Constraints

International audienceA Service Function Chain (SFC) is an ordered sequence of network functions, such as load balancing, content filtering, and firewall. With the Network Function Virtualization (NFV) paradigm, network functions can be deployed as pieces of software on generic hardware, leading to a flexibility of network service composition. Along with its benefits, NFV brings several challenges to network operators, such as the placement of virtual network functions. In this paper, we study the problem of how to optimally place the network functions within the network in order to satisfy all the SFC requirements of the flows. Our optimization task is to minimize the total deployment cost. We show that the problem can be seen as an instance of the Set Cover Problem, even in the case of ordered sequences of network functions. It allows us to propose two logarithmic factor approximation algorithms which have the best possible asymp-totic factor. Further, we devise an optimal algorithm for tree topologies. Finally, we evaluate the performances of our proposed algorithms through extensive simulations. We demonstrate that near-optimal solutions can be found with our approach