Software-Defined Infrastructure for IoT-based Energy Systems

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are becoming an essential part of our everyday lives. These physical devices are connected to the internet and can measure or control the environment around us. Further, IoT devices are increasingly being used to monitor buildings, farms, health, and transportation. As these connected devices become more pervasive, these devices will generate vast amounts of data that can be used to gain insights and build intelligence into the system. At the same time, large-scale deployment of these devices will raise new challenges in efficiently managing and controlling them. In this thesis, I argue that the IoT devices need programmability and need to provide software controls in order to manage them efficiently. Further, it will need data-driven modeling techniques to process and analyze a vast amount of data from heterogeneous devices to derive actionable insights. My thesis explores the problems posed by software-defined IoT energy infrastructure. I present four techniques that use systems and machine learning principles to design, analyze and deploy the next generation of smart IoT energy systems. First, I discuss how current state-of-the-art LIDAR-based approaches in identifying ideal locations on rooftops for deploying energy systems such as solar do not scale to many regions of the world. To address the challenges, I propose DeepRoof, a data-driven approach that uses deep learning to estimate the solar potential of roofs using satellite imagery and identify ideal locations for installation. We evaluate our approach on different types of roof and show that our technique is comparable to LIDAR-based methods. Second, I study how excessive solar can cause problems in the grid and examine how programmatic control of the solar output can prevent congestion in the electric grid. Further, I present a decentralized approach that can control the solar arrays in a grid-friendly manner. Also, my approach provides flexible control of solar output, and I show that such mechanisms allow for higher solar penetration in the grid. Third, I discuss the challenges in community-owned (and shared) distributed energy resources that do not provide independent control to users. To do so, I propose vSolar, an approach to virtualize the solar arrays and energy storage that allows independent control. Further, I show how using vSolar users can exercise independent control, implement their custom energy sharing policies, and reduce energy costs through energy trading. Finally, I present the challenges, and the high throughput needs to enable a peer-to-peer energy trading platform using permissioned blockchains. I propose FabricPlus, an enhanced Hyperledger Fabric blockchain, that contains a series of optimizations to enable high throughput transactions. FabricPlus increases the transaction throughput many folds, without requiring any changes to its external interfaces. I also show considerable performance improvement over the baseline Fabric

A Service-Aware Virtualized Software-Defined Infrastructure

The Internet infrastructure is gradually improving its flexibility and adaptability due to the incorporation of new promising technologies, such as the software-defined networks and the network function virtualization. The main goal is to meet the diverse communication needs of the users, while the global system operation satisfies the business and societal goals of the infrastructure and service providers. This calls for solutions that consider both local and global network viewpoints and provide sophisticated system control in a stable and predictable way, while being service-aware. We propose a fully integrated solution along these lines: the VLSP, a service-aware software-defined infrastructure for networks and clouds. The VLSP consists of three main distributed systems: a facility performing uniformly logically-centralized management and control of the infrastructure, called the virtual infrastructure management; an information management infrastructure able to maintain an accurate view of the infrastructure environment at both the local and system levels, called the virtual infrastructure information service; and a lightweight virtualization hypervisor able to perform configuration changes in the infrastructure resources, called the lightweight network hypervisor. We discuss representative use-case scenarios, while we demonstrate how VLSP tunes performance trade-offs for particular service demands

Engineering Self-Adaptive Applications on Software Defined Infrastructure

Cloud computing is a flexible platform that offers faster innovation, elastic resources, and economies of scale. However, it is challenging to ensure non-functional properties such as performance, cost and security of applications hosted in cloud. Applications should be adaptive to the fluctuating workload to meet the desired performance goals, in one hand, and on the other, operate in an economic manner to reduce the operational cost. Moreover, cloud applications are attractive target of security threats such as distributed denial of service attacks that target the availability of applications and increase the cost. Given such circumstances, it is vital to engineer applications that are able to self-adapt to such volatile conditions. In this thesis, we investigate techniques and mechanisms to engineer model-based application autonomic management systems that strive to meet performance, cost and security objectives of software systems running in cloud. In addition to using the elasticity feature of cloud, our proposed autonomic management systems employ run-time network adaptations using the emerging software defined networking and network function virtualization. We propose a novel approach to self-protecting applications where the application traffic is dynamically managed between public and private cloud depending on the condition of the traffic. Our management approach is able to adapt the bandwidth rates of application traffic to meet performance and cost objectives. Through run-time performance models as well as optimization, the management system maximizes the profit each time the application requires to adapt. Our autonomous management solutions are implemented and evaluated analytically as well as on multiple public and community clouds to demonstrate their applicability and effectiveness in real world environment

Deploying and Evaluating OF@TEIN Access Center and Its Feasibility for Access Federation

For the emerging software-defined infrastructure, to be orchestrated from so-called logically centralized DevOps Tower, the shared accessibility of distributed playground resources and the timely interaction among operators and developers are highly required. In this paper, by taking OF@TEIN SDN-Cloud playground as a target environment, we discuss an access center effort to address the above requirements. In providing the developer presence via the proposed access center, the inherent heterogeneity of internationally dispersed OF@TEIN resources is setting a unique challenge to cope with the broad spectrum of link bandwidths and round-trip delays. The access capability of deployed access center is experimentally verified against a wide range of access network conditions, which would be extended for futuristic access federation with appropriate identity management and resources abstraction for multiple developers and operators

Hyper Converged Infrastructures: Beyond virtualization

Hyper Convergence has brought virtualization and IT strategies to a new level. Datacenters are undergoing a deep paradigm shift from a hardware-centric to an application-centric approach which leverages on software defined architectures, while IT is more and more being delivered as services rather than assets or products. Throughout different evolving phases since the initial attempts to convergence, the concept has been refined down to a level where,ultimately, a whole datacenter could be fully managed from a centralized single point, abstracting the whole hardware layer and exposing it to the administrators as a transparent pool of resources. This paper analyzes the evolution of infrastructures and tries to dig into the reality and convenience of Hyper Convergence