Management Application Interactions in Software-Based Networks

IEEE To support the next wave of networking technologies and services, which will likely involve heterogeneous resources and requirements, rich management functionality will need to be deployed. This raises questions regarding the interoperability of such functionality in an environment where potentially interacting applications operate in parallel. Interactions can cause configuration instabilities and subsequently network performance degradation, especially in the presence of contradicting objectives. Detecting and handling these interactions is therefore essential. In this article we present an overview of the interaction management problem, a critical issue in software-based networks. We review and compare existing solutions proposed in the literature and discuss key challenges toward the development of a generic framework for the automated and real-time management of these interactions

Multi-Commodity Flow with In-Network Processing

Modern networks run "middleboxes" that offer services ranging from network address translation and server load balancing to firewalls, encryption, and compression. In an industry trend known as Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), these middleboxes run as virtual machines on any commodity server, and the switches steer traffic through the relevant chain of services. Network administrators must decide how many middleboxes to run, where to place them, and how to direct traffic through them, based on the traffic load and the server and network capacity. Rather than placing specific kinds of middleboxes on each processing node, we argue that server virtualization allows each server node to host all middlebox functions, and simply vary the fraction of resources devoted to each one. This extra flexibility fundamentally changes the optimization problem the network administrators must solve to a new kind of multi-commodity flow problem, where the traffic flows consume bandwidth on the links as well as processing resources on the nodes. We show that allocating resources to maximize the processed flow can be optimized exactly via a linear programming formulation, and to arbitrary accuracy via an efficient combinatorial algorithm. Our experiments with real traffic and topologies show that a joint optimization of node and link resources leads to an efficient use of bandwidth and processing capacity. We also study a class of design problems that decide where to provide node capacity to best process and route a given set of demands, and demonstrate both approximation algorithms and hardness results for these problems

A Northbound Interface for Software-based Networks

The current shift from traditional network architectures to software-based solutions is offering new opportunities to allow network functionality to be managed in a flexible way. Substantial efforts have been invested in the recent years in the development of new network management approaches taking advantage of emerging paradigms such as software-defined networking and network function virtualization. Until now however there has not been much progress in the development of a northbound interface (NBI) linking high-level requirements (HLRs) capturing business objectives to management operations. This is a crucial functionality to facilitate faster service deployment and realization of business objectives. In this paper we extend the efforts towards the development of a NBI and propose a novel approach for the automatic decomposition of HLRs to network management operations. We demonstrate its functionality based on representative use cases and evaluate its feasibility through prototype implementation. The results obtained show that our solution can translate new technical requirements to network configurations in the order of a few seconds, thus enabling the management of network functionality and services in short timescales

A Northbound Interface for Software-based Networks

The current shift from traditional network architectures to software-based solutions is offering new opportunities to allow network functionality to be managed in a flexible way. Substantial efforts have been invested in the recent years in the development of new network management approaches taking advantage of emerging paradigms such as software-defined networking and network function virtualization. Until now however there has not been much progress in the development of a northbound interface (NBI) linking high-level requirements (HLRs) capturing business objectives to management operations. This is a crucial functionality to facilitate faster service deployment and realization of business objectives. In this paper we extend the efforts towards the development of a NBI and propose a novel approach for the automatic decomposition of HLRs to network management operations. We demonstrate its functionality based on representative use cases and evaluate its feasibility through prototype implementation. The results obtained show that our solution can translate new technical requirements to network configurations in the order of a few seconds, thus enabling the management of network functionality and services in short timescales

Enhancing Automated Network Management

Network management benefits from automated tools. With the recent advent of software-defined principles, automated tools have been proposed from both industry and academia to fulfill function components in the network management control loop. While automation aims to accommodate the ever increasing network diversity and dynamics with improved reliability and management efficiency, it also brings new concerns as it’s becoming more difficult to understand the control of the network and operators cannot rely on traditional troubleshooting tools. Meanwhile, how to effectively integrate new automation tools with existing legacy networks remains a question. This dissertationpresents efficient methods to address key functionalities within the control loop in the adaption of automated network management.Identifying the network-wide forwarding behaviors of a packet is essential for many network management tasks, including policy enforcement, rule verification, and fault localization. We start by presenting AP Classifier. AP Classifier was developed based on the concept of atomic predicates which can be used to characterize the forwarding behaviors of packets. There is an increasing trend that enterprises outsource their Network Function (NF) processing to a cloud to lower cost and ease management. To avoid threats to the enterprise’s private information, we propose SICS based on AP Classifier, a secure and dynamic NF outsourcing framework. Stateful NFs have become essential parts of modern networks, increasing the complexity in network management. A major step in network automation is to automatically translate high level network intents into low level configurations. To ensure those configurations and the states generated by automation match intents, we present Epinoia, a network intent checker for stateful networks. While the concept of auto-translation sounds promising, operators may not know what intents should be. To close the control loop, we present AutoInfer to automatically infer intents of running networks, which helps operators understand the network runtime states

Expression and Composition of Optimization-Based Applications for Software-Defined Networking

Motivated by the adoption of the Software Defined Networking and its increasing focus on applications for resource management, we propose a novel framework for expressing network optimization applications. Named the SDN Optimization Layer (SOL), the framework and its extensions alleviate the burden of constructing optimization applications by abstracting the low-level details of mathematical optimization techniques such as linear programming. SOL utilizes the path abstraction to express a wide variety of network constraints and resource-management logic. We show that the framework is general and efficient enough to support various classes of applications. We extend SOL to support composition of multiple applications in a fair and resource-efficient way. We demonstrate that SOL’s composition produces better resource efficiency than previously available composition approaches and is tolerant to network variations. Finally, as a case study, we develop a new application for load balancing network intrusion prevention systems, called SNIPS. We highlight the challenges in developing the SNIPS optimization from the ground up, show SOL’s (conceptually) simplified version, and verify that both produce nearly identical solutions.Doctor of Philosoph

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

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