Deliverable JRA1.1: Evaluation of current network control and management planes for multi-domain network infrastructure

This deliverable includes a compilation and evaluation of available control and management architectures and protocols applicable to a multilayer infrastructure in a multi-domain Virtual Network environment.The scope of this deliverable is mainly focused on the virtualisation of the resources within a network and at processing nodes. The virtualization of the FEDERICA infrastructure allows the provisioning of its available resources to users by means of FEDERICA slices. A slice is seen by the user as a real physical network under his/her domain, however it maps to a logical partition (a virtual instance) of the physical FEDERICA resources. A slice is built to exhibit to the highest degree all the principles applicable to a physical network (isolation, reproducibility, manageability, ...). Currently, there are no standard definitions available for network virtualization or its associated architectures. Therefore, this deliverable proposes the Virtual Network layer architecture and evaluates a set of Management- and Control Planes that can be used for the partitioning and virtualization of the FEDERICA network resources. This evaluation has been performed taking into account an initial set of FEDERICA requirements; a possible extension of the selected tools will be evaluated in future deliverables. The studies described in this deliverable define the virtual architecture of the FEDERICA infrastructure. During this activity, the need has been recognised to establish a new set of basic definitions (taxonomy) for the building blocks that compose the so-called slice, i.e. the virtual network instantiation (which is virtual with regard to the abstracted view made of the building blocks of the FEDERICA infrastructure) and its architectural plane representation. These definitions will be established as a common nomenclature for the FEDERICA project. Other important aspects when defining a new architecture are the user requirements. It is crucial that the resulting architecture fits the demands that users may have. Since this deliverable has been produced at the same time as the contact process with users, made by the project activities related to the Use Case definitions, JRA1 has proposed a set of basic Use Cases to be considered as starting point for its internal studies. When researchers want to experiment with their developments, they need not only network resources on their slices, but also a slice of the processing resources. These processing slice resources are understood as virtual machine instances that users can use to make them behave as software routers or end nodes, on which to download the software protocols or applications they have produced and want to assess in a realistic environment. Hence, this deliverable also studies the APIs of several virtual machine management software products in order to identify which best suits FEDERICA’s needs.Postprint (published version

Cross-layer multi-cloud real-time application QoS monitoring and benchmarking as-a-service framework

Cloud computing provides on-demand access to affordable hardware (e.g., multi-core CPUs, GPUs, disks, and networking equipment) and software (e.g., databases, application servers and data processing frameworks) platforms with features such as elasticity, pay-per-use, low upfront investment and low time to market. This has led to the proliferation of business criti-cal applications that leverage various cloud platforms. Such applications hosted on sin-gle/multiple cloud platforms have diverse characteristics requiring extensive monitoring and benchmarking mechanisms to ensure run-time Quality of Service (QoS) (e.g., latency and throughput). The process of monitoring and benchmarking cloud applications is as yet a criti-cal issue to be further studied and addressed. Current monitoring and benchmarking approaches do not provide a holistic view of per-formance QoS for distributed applications cross cloud layers on multi-cloud environments. Furthermore, current monitoring frameworks are limited to monitoring tasks and do not in-corporate benchmarking abilities. In other words, there is no unified framework that com-bines monitoring and benchmarking functionalities. To gain the ability of both monitoring and benchmarking all under one framework will empower the cloud user to gain more in-depth control and awareness of cloud services. The Thesis identifies and discusses the major research dimensions and design issues relat-ed to developing techniques that can monitor and benchmark an application’s components cross-layers on multi-clouds. Furthermore, the thesis discusses to what extent such research dimensions and design issues are handled by current academic research papers as well as by the existing commercial monitoring tools. Moreover, the Thesis addresses an important research challenge of how to undertake cross-layer cloud monitoring and benchmarking in multi-cloud environments to provide es-sential information for effective cloud applications QoS management. It proposes, develops, implements and validates CLAMBS: Cross-Layer Multi-Cloud Application Monitoring and Benchmarking, as-a-Service Framework. The core contributions made by this thesis are the development of the CLAMBS framework and underlying monitoring and benchmarking tech-niques which are capable of: i) performing QoS monitoring of application components (e.g. ii database, web server, application server, etc.) that may be deployed across multiple cloud platforms (e.g. Amazon EC2, and Microsoft Azure); and ii) giving visibility into the QoS of in-dividual application components, which is not supported by current monitoring and bench-marking frameworks. Experiments are conducted on real-world multi-cloud platforms to em-pirically evaluate the framework and the results validate that CLAMBS can effectively monitor and benchmark applications running cross-layers on multi-clouds. The thesis presents implementation and evaluation details of the proposed CLAMBS framework. It demonstrates the feasibility and scalability of the proposed framework in real-world environments by implementing a proof-of-concept prototype on multi-cloud platforms. Finally, it presents a model for analysing the communication overheads introduced by various components (e.g. agents and manager) of CLAMBS in multi cloud environments

Algorithms for advance bandwidth reservation in media production networks

Media production generally requires many geographically distributed actors (e.g., production houses, broadcasters, advertisers) to exchange huge amounts of raw video and audio data. Traditional distribution techniques, such as dedicated point-to-point optical links, are highly inefficient in terms of installation time and cost. To improve efficiency, shared media production networks that connect all involved actors over a large geographical area, are currently being deployed. The traffic in such networks is often predictable, as the timing and bandwidth requirements of data transfers are generally known hours or even days in advance. As such, the use of advance bandwidth reservation (AR) can greatly increase resource utilization and cost efficiency. In this paper, we propose an Integer Linear Programming formulation of the bandwidth scheduling problem, which takes into account the specific characteristics of media production networks, is presented. Two novel optimization algorithms based on this model are thoroughly evaluated and compared by means of in-depth simulation results

Building Programmable Wireless Networks: An Architectural Survey

In recent times, there have been a lot of efforts for improving the ossified Internet architecture in a bid to sustain unstinted growth and innovation. A major reason for the perceived architectural ossification is the lack of ability to program the network as a system. This situation has resulted partly from historical decisions in the original Internet design which emphasized decentralized network operations through co-located data and control planes on each network device. The situation for wireless networks is no different resulting in a lot of complexity and a plethora of largely incompatible wireless technologies. The emergence of "programmable wireless networks", that allow greater flexibility, ease of management and configurability, is a step in the right direction to overcome the aforementioned shortcomings of the wireless networks. In this paper, we provide a broad overview of the architectures proposed in literature for building programmable wireless networks focusing primarily on three popular techniques, i.e., software defined networks, cognitive radio networks, and virtualized networks. This survey is a self-contained tutorial on these techniques and its applications. We also discuss the opportunities and challenges in building next-generation programmable wireless networks and identify open research issues and future research directions.Comment: 19 page

Enhanced IPFIX flow processing mechanism for overlay network monitoring

Cloud computing is an emerging technology. People are adopting cloud at a faster rate, due to this cloud network traffic is increasing at a pace which is challenging to manage. Monitoring tool is an essential aspect of cloud computing and becomes more apparent with the acquired of cloud services. Overlay network provides new path to converge network and run as an independent virtual network on top of physical network. Currently, cloud overlay network technologies in cloud infrastructure have visibility gaps, which mean cloud provider and consumers miss out the major performance issues for troubleshooting of overlay network traffic. Hence, to keep a close watch on network and catch potential problems, a network monitoring tool required, to track and report more in-depth for not only see the hidden traffic but also presents the related information of cloud overlay network technologies specifically suited to the modern cloud-scale data center. Therefore, this study proposes an enhanced IP Flow Information Export (IPFIX) mechanism for cloud overlay network monitoring by adopting flexible flow based technique. Furthermore, the solution provided in this research consist of diverse mechanisms: enhanced packet filtering mechanisms using property match filtering technique and hash-based filtering technique. Virtual Extensible Local Area Network (VXLAN) based flow classification mechanisms using 6-tuple flow pattern and adoptable flow patterns. IPFIX message template mechanisms, which is comprise set of fields for data records within the IPFIX flow processing system. The findings demonstrate that the proposed mechanism can capture multi-tenant overlay network traffic to identify, track, analyze and continuously monitor the performance of cloud overlay network services. The proposed mechanisms are resource efficient where the combination of VFMFM+6tuple+VXLAN Message consume 4.63% less CPU, while the combination of VHFM+AFCM+AFCM Message consume 11.45% less CPU than Standard IPFIX. The contributions of this study would help cloud network operators and end-users to quickly and proactively resolve any overlay network based on performance issues with end-to end visibility and actionable insights

Dynamic Context Awareness of Universal Middleware based for IoT SNMP Service Platform

This study focused on the Universal Middleware design for the IoT (Internet of Things) service gateway for the implementation module of the convergence platform. Recently, IoT service gateway including convergence platform could be supported on dynamic module system that is required mounting and recognized intelligent status with the remote network protocol. These awareness concepts support the dynamic environment of the cross-platform distributed computing technology is supported by these idea as a Universal Middleware for network substitution. Distribution system commonly used in recent embedded systems include CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture), RMI (Remote Method Invocation), DCE (Distributed Computing Environment) for dynamic service interface, and suggested implementations of a device object context. However, the aforementioned technologies do not support each standardization of application services, communication protocols, and data, but are also limited in supporting inter-system scalability. In particular, in order to configure an IoT service module, the system can be simplified, and an independent service module can be configured as long as it can support the standardization of modules based on hardware and software components. This paper proposed a design method for Universal Middleware that, by providing IoT modules and service gateways with scalability for configuring operating system configuration, may be utilized as an alternative. This design could be a standardized interface provisioning way for hardware and software components as convergence services, and providing a framework for system construction. Universal Middleware Framework could be presented and dynamic environment standardization module of network protocols, various application service modules such as JINI (Apache River), UPnP (Universal Plug & Play), SLP (Service Location Protocol) bundles that provide communication facilities, and persistence data module. In this IoT gateway, management for based Universal Middleware framework support and available for each management operation, application service component could be cross-executed over SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) version 1, version 2, and version 3. The way of SNMP extension service modules are conducted cross-support each module and independent system meta-information that could be built life cycle management component through the MIB (Management Information Base) information unit analysis. Therefore, the MIB role of relation with the Dispatcher applied to support multiple concurrent SNMP messages by receiving incoming messages and managing the transfer of PDU (Protocol Data Unit) between the RFC 1906 network in this study. Results of the study revealed utilizing Universal Middleware that dynamic situations of context objects with mechanisms and tools to publish information could be consisted of IoT to standardize module interfaces to external service clients as a convergence between hardware and software platforms