Resource orchestration strategies with retrials for latency-sensitive network slicing over distributed telco clouds

The new radio technologies (i.e. 5G and beyond) will allow a new generation of innovative services operated by vertical industries (e.g. robotic cloud, autonomous vehicles, etc.) with more stringent QoS requirements, especially in terms of end-to-end latency. Other technological changes, such as Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN), will bring unique service capabilities to networks by enabling flexible network slicing that can be tailored to the needs of vertical services. However, effective orchestration strategies need to be put in place to offer latency minimization while also maximizing resource utilization for telco providers to address vertical requirements and increase their revenue. Looking at this objective, this paper addresses a latency-sensitive orchestration problem by proposing different strategies for the coordinated selection of virtual resources (network, computational, and storage resources) in distributed DCs while meeting vertical requirements (e.g., bandwidth demand) for network slicing. Three orchestration strategies are presented to minimize latency or the blocking probability through effective resource utilization. To further reduce the slice request blocking, orchestration strategies also encompass a retrial mechanism applied to rejected slice requests. Regarding latency, two components were considered, namely processing and network latency. An extensive set of simulations was carried out over a wide and composite telco cloud infrastructure in which different types of data centers coexist characterized by a different network location, size, and processing capacity. The results compare the behavior of the strategies in addressing latency minimization and service request fulfillment, also considering the impact of the retrial mechanism.This work was supported in part by the Department of Excellence in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence by Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca (MIUR) to Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, and in part by the Project 5GROWTH under Agreement 856709

MIFaaS: A Mobile-IoT-Federation-as-a-Service Model for dynamic cooperation of IoT Cloud Providers

In the Internet of Things (IoT) arena, a constant evolution is observed towards the deployment of integrated environments, wherein heterogeneous devices pool their capacities to match wide-ranging user requirements. Solutions for efficient and synergistic cooperation among objects are, therefore, required. This paper suggests a novel paradigm to support dynamic cooperation among private/public local clouds of IoT devices. Differently from . device-oriented approaches typical of Mobile Cloud Computing, the proposed paradigm envisages an . IoT Cloud Provider (ICP)-oriented cooperation, which allows all devices belonging to the same private/public owner to participate in the federation process. Expected result from dynamic federations among ICPs is a remarkable increase in the amount of service requests being satisfied. Different from the Fog Computing vision, the network edge provides only management support and supervision to the proposed Mobile-IoT-Federation-as-a-Service (MIFaaS), thus reducing the deployment cost of peripheral micro data centers. The paper proposes a coalition formation game to account for the interest of rational cooperative ICPs in their own payoff. A proof-of-concept performance evaluation confirms that obtained coalition structures not only guarantee the satisfaction of the players' requirements according to their utility function, but also these introduce significant benefits for the cooperating ICPs in terms of number of tasks being successfully assigned

On the Fly Orchestration of Unikernels: Tuning and Performance Evaluation of Virtual Infrastructure Managers

Network operators are facing significant challenges meeting the demand for more bandwidth, agile infrastructures, innovative services, while keeping costs low. Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Cloud Computing are emerging as key trends of 5G network architectures, providing flexibility, fast instantiation times, support of Commercial Off The Shelf hardware and significant cost savings. NFV leverages Cloud Computing principles to move the data-plane network functions from expensive, closed and proprietary hardware to the so-called Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). In this paper we deal with the management of virtual computing resources (Unikernels) for the execution of VNFs. This functionality is performed by the Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM) in the NFV MANagement and Orchestration (MANO) reference architecture. We discuss the instantiation process of virtual resources and propose a generic reference model, starting from the analysis of three open source VIMs, namely OpenStack, Nomad and OpenVIM. We improve the aforementioned VIMs introducing the support for special-purpose Unikernels and aiming at reducing the duration of the instantiation process. We evaluate some performance aspects of the VIMs, considering both stock and tuned versions. The VIM extensions and performance evaluation tools are available under a liberal open source licence

Integration of Clouds to Industrial Communication Networks

Cloud computing, owing to its ubiquitousness, scalability and on-demand ac- cess, has transformed into many traditional sectors, such as telecommunication and manufacturing production. As the Fifth Generation Wireless Specifica- tions (5G) emerges, the demand on ubiquitous and re-configurable computing resources for handling tremendous traffic from omnipresent mobile devices has been put forward. And therein lies the adaption of cloud-native model in service delivery of telecommunication networks. However, it takes phased approaches to successfully transform the traditional Telco infrastructure to a softwarized model, especially for Radio Access Networks (RANs), which, as of now, mostly relies on purpose-built Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) for computing and processing tasks.On the other hand, Industry 4.0 is leading the digital transformation in manufacturing sectors, wherein the industrial networks is evolving towards wireless connectivity and the automation process managements are shifting to clouds. However, such integration may introduce unwanted disturbances to critical industrial automation processes. This leads to challenges to guaran- tee the performance of critical applications under the integration of different systems.In the work presented in this thesis, we mainly explore the feasibility of inte- grating wireless communication, industrial networks and cloud computing. We have mainly investigated the delay-inhibited challenges and the performance impacts of using cloud-native models for critical applications. We design a solution, targeting at diminishing the performance degradation caused by the integration of cloud computing

A Decade of Research in Fog computing: Relevance, Challenges, and Future Directions

Recent developments in the Internet of Things (IoT) and real-time applications, have led to the unprecedented growth in the connected devices and their generated data. Traditionally, this sensor data is transferred and processed at the cloud, and the control signals are sent back to the relevant actuators, as part of the IoT applications. This cloud-centric IoT model, resulted in increased latencies and network load, and compromised privacy. To address these problems, Fog Computing was coined by Cisco in 2012, a decade ago, which utilizes proximal computational resources for processing the sensor data. Ever since its proposal, fog computing has attracted significant attention and the research fraternity focused at addressing different challenges such as fog frameworks, simulators, resource management, placement strategies, quality of service aspects, fog economics etc. However, after a decade of research, we still do not see large-scale deployments of public/private fog networks, which can be utilized in realizing interesting IoT applications. In the literature, we only see pilot case studies and small-scale testbeds, and utilization of simulators for demonstrating scale of the specified models addressing the respective technical challenges. There are several reasons for this, and most importantly, fog computing did not present a clear business case for the companies and participating individuals yet. This paper summarizes the technical, non-functional and economic challenges, which have been posing hurdles in adopting fog computing, by consolidating them across different clusters. The paper also summarizes the relevant academic and industrial contributions in addressing these challenges and provides future research directions in realizing real-time fog computing applications, also considering the emerging trends such as federated learning and quantum computing.Comment: Accepted for publication at Wiley Software: Practice and Experience journa

A reference architecture for multi-level SLA management

There is a global trend towards service-orientation, both for organizing business interactions but also in modern IT architectures. At the business-level, service industries are becoming the dominating sector in which solutions are flexibly composed out of networked services. At the IT level, the paradigms of Service-Oriented Architecture and Cloud Computing realize service-orientation for both software and infrastructure services. Again, flexible composition across different layers is a major advantage of this paradigm. Service Level Agreements (SLA) are a common approach for specifying the exact conditions under which services are to be delivered and, thus, are a prerequisite for supporting the flexible trading of services. However, typical SLAs are just specified at a single layer and do not allow service providers to manage their service stack accordingly. They have no insight on how SLAs at one layer translate to metrics or parameters at the various lower layers of the service stack. In this paper, we present a reference architecture for a multi-level SLA management framework. We discuss the fundamental concepts and detail the main architectural components and interfaces. Furthermore, we show how the framework can be flexibly used for different industrial scenarios

PROFILING - CONCEPTS AND APPLICATIONS

Profiling is an approach to put a label or a set of labels on a subject, considering the characteristics of this subject. The New Oxford American Dictionary defines profiling as: “recording and analysis of a person’s psychological and behavioral characteristics, so as to assess or predict his/her capabilities in a certain sphere or to assist in identifying a particular subgroup of people”. This research extends this definition towards things demonstrating that many methods used for profiling of people may be applied for a different type of subjects, namely things. The goal of this research concerns proposing methods for discovery of profiles of users and things with application of Data Science methods. The profiles are utilized in vertical and 2 horizontal scenarios and concern such domains as smart grid and telecommunication (vertical scenarios), and support provided both for the needs of authorization and personalization (horizontal usage).:The thesis consists of eight chapters including an introduction and a summary. First chapter describes motivation for work that was carried out for the last 8 years together with discussion on its importance both for research and business practice. The motivation for this work is much broader and emerges also from business importance of profiling and personalization. The introduction summarizes major research directions, provides research questions, goals and supplementary objectives addressed in the thesis. Research methodology is also described, showing impact of methodological aspects on the work undertaken. Chapter 2 provides introduction to the notion of profiling. The definition of profiling is introduced. Here, also a relation of a user profile to an identity is discussed. The papers included in this chapter show not only how broadly a profile may be understood, but also how a profile may be constructed considering different data sources. Profiling methods are introduced in Chapter 3. This chapter refers to the notion of a profile developed using the BFI-44 personality test and outcomes of a survey related to color preferences of people with a specific personality. Moreover, insights into profiling of relations between people are provided, with a focus on quality of a relation emerging from contacts between two entities. Chapters from 4 to 7 present different scenarios that benefit from application of profiling methods. Chapter 4 starts with introducing the notion of a public utility company that in the thesis is discussed using examples from smart grid and telecommunication. Then, in chapter 4 follows a description of research results regarding profiling for the smart grid, focusing on a profile of a prosumer and forecasting demand and production of the electric energy in the smart grid what can be influenced e.g. by weather or profiles of appliances. Chapter 5 presents application of profiling techniques in the field of telecommunication. Besides presenting profiling methods based on telecommunication data, in particular on Call Detail Records, also scenarios and issues related to privacy and trust are addressed. Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 target at horizontal applications of profiling that may be of benefit for multiple domains. Chapter 6 concerns profiling for authentication using un-typical data sources such as Call Detail Records or data from a mobile phone describing the user behavior. Besides proposing methods, also limitations are discussed. In addition, as a side research effect a methodology for evaluation of authentication methods is proposed. Chapter 7 concerns personalization and consists of two diverse parts. Firstly, behavioral profiles to change interface and behavior of the system are proposed and applied. The performance of solutions personalizing content either locally or on the server is studied. Then, profiles of customers of shopping centers are created based on paths identified using Call Detail Records. The analysis demonstrates that the data that is collected for one purpose, may significantly influence other business scenarios. Chapter 8 summarizes the research results achieved by the author of this document. It presents contribution over state of the art as well as some insights into the future work planned

Teleoperaattorin pilvipalvelualusta: käsite, kustannusrakenne ja strategiset johtopäätökset

Telecommunications providers are facing pressures to adjust their production models while markets are changing and cloud service models are spreading to their business areas. The Telco Cloud platform model was designed to respond to these forces. The Telco Cloud is a cloud computing platform that is intended for virtualized network functions. The platform meets requirements of the telecommunications market and regulations. A cloud based production model is a new concept in the context of telecommunications services, hence, the field of the Telco Cloud is not yet well researched area. Furthermore, the cost structure and strategic implications of the Telco Cloud platform are still poorly understood. This empirical research uses a single company single case study approach to examine the Telco Cloud paradigm, cost structures, processes and strategic implications by using qualitative and explorative analysis methods. The data collection was done using literature review and interviews. The literature review revealed that very little research is done on the field. Furthermore, eight semi-structured interviews were carried out with persons in managerial position. These experts were working in the Telco Cloud project in the case company and had deep telecommunications industry knowledge. The results of the study indicate that the Telco Cloud benefits improved investment efficiency due to a server virtualization and consolidation compared to the traditional platform model; high level of automation and server utilization are key features to achieve benefits; increased personnel costs in the software development and communication are prolonging the break-even point; and the platform takes advantage of the network effects and the Telco Cloud eventually shall improve significantly operator’s cost efficiency. This research aims to provide a base for further research. Furthermore, the research contributes the application on-boarding process that can be used for managing the complexity of a Telco Cloud deployment.Teleoperaattorit joutuvat tarkastelemaan tuotantotapojaan pilvipalveluiden levittäytyessä myös teletoiminnan piiriin. Teleoperaattorin pilvi voidaan nähdä vastauksena muutospaineeseen. Teleoperaattorin pilvi on pilvilaskentapohjainen palvelualusta, joka on tarkoitettu verkkotoiminnallisuuksien virtualisointiin ja se täyttää markkinan ja regulaation asettamat vaatimukset. Pilvituotantomalli on uusi konsepti telepalveluiden alueella. Lisäksi Teleoperaattorin pilvi-mallia ei ole vielä juurikaan tutkittu. Lisäksi teleoperaattorin pilvi-mallin kustannusrakenne ja strategiset seuraamukset ovat vielä huonosti ymmärrettyjä. Tämän opinnäytetyön yhteydessä suoritettiin kvalitatiivinen ja eksploratiivinen tutkimus yksittäisen tapaustutkimuksen avulla. Tutkimuskohteena oli Teleoperaattorin pilvi käsitteenä, sen kustannusrakenne ja strategiset seuraukset. Tiedonkeruu suoritettiin kirjallisuustutkimuksen ja haastatteluiden avulla. Kirjallisuustutkimus osoitti, että aluetta on tutkittu erittäin vähän ja vallitsevaa paradigmaa ei ole vielä syntynyt. Tutkimuksen empiirisessä osuudessa suoritettiin kahdeksan puolistrukturoitua haastattelua alan asiantuntijoiden kanssa. Tutkimuksen tulokset osoittavat, että Teleoperaattorin pilvi mahdollistaa palvelinvirtualisoinnin ja konsolidaation avulla tehostumista investointien käytössä verrattuna perinteiseen palvelualustamalliin; korkea automaatioaste ja palvelinten korkea kuormitusaste ovat edellytyksiä tehostumisen saavuttamiseksi; kasvavat henkilöstökulut ohjelmistokehityksessä ja sidosryhmäkommunikoinnissa pitkittävät kannattavuusrajan saavuttamista; ja toimija voi parantaa kustannustehokkuuttaan merkittävästi konsolidoimalla palveluitaan Teleoperaattorin pilvi-alustaan. Tämän tutkimuksen tarkoituksena on luoda pohjaa tulevalle tutkimukselle. Lisäksi tutkimuksen tulokset tarjoavat prosessin sovellusten siirtämiseksi Teleoperaattorin pilveen