MeDICINE: Rapid Prototyping of Production-Ready Network Services in Multi-PoP Environments

Virtualized network services consisting of multiple individual network functions are already today deployed across multiple sites, so called multi-PoP (points of presence) environ- ments. This allows to improve service performance by optimizing its placement in the network. But prototyping and testing of these complex distributed software systems becomes extremely challenging. The reason is that not only the network service as such has to be tested but also its integration with management and orchestration systems. Existing solutions, like simulators, basic network emulators, or local cloud testbeds, do not support all aspects of these tasks. To this end, we introduce MeDICINE, a novel NFV prototyping platform that is able to execute production-ready network func- tions, provided as software containers, in an emulated multi-PoP environment. These network functions can be controlled by any third-party management and orchestration system that connects to our platform through standard interfaces. Based on this, a developer can use our platform to prototype and test complex network services in a realistic environment running on his laptop.Comment: 6 pages, pre-prin

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

ARNAB: Transparent Service Continuity across Orchestrated Edge Networks

Paper presented at: IEEE GLOBECOM 2018 Workshops: Intelligent Network orchestration and interaction in 5G and beyond. Abu Dabhi. 9-13 December 2018In this paper, we present an architecture for transparent service continuity for cloud-enabled WiFi networks called ARNAB: ARchitecture for traNsparent service continuity viA douBle-tier migration. The term arnab means rabbit in Arabic. It is dubbed for the proposed service architecture because a mobileuser service with ARNAB behaves like a rabbit hopping through the WiFi infrastructure. To deliver continuous services, deploying edge clouds is not sufficient. Users may travel far from the initial serving edge and also perform multiple WiFi handoffs during mobility. To solve this, ARNAB employs a double-tier migration scheme. One migration tier is for user connectivity, and the other one is for edge applications. Our experimental results show that ARNAB can not only enable continuous service delivery but also outperform the existing work in the area of container live migration across edge clouds.This work has been partially supported by the H2020 collaborative Europe/Taiwan research project 5G-CORAL (grant num. 761586)

On the design of a native Zero-touch 6G architecture

The complexity of envisioned 6G telecommunication networks requires an intrinsically intelligent architecture designed to autonomously adapt to dynamics with end-to-end zero-touch service automation operations. Motivated by this vision, this paper tries to formulate concepts and solution aspects towards designing a native Zero-touch 6G architecture. Our discussion concentrates around three main pillars, i.e. (i) introducing Machine Learning (ML) models in the core design of the 6G architecture as native functions rather than add-on model solutions; (ii) distributing 6G functionality to different components up to the extreme edge; to (iii) leverage technology leaps enabling, e.g., the use of multi-access technologies and peer-topeer communications besides the standard cellular connectivity and other centralised functionalit

A service-oriented approach for dynamic chaining of virtual network functions over multi-provider software-defined networks

Emerging technologies such as Software-Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) promise to address cost reduction and flexibility in network operation while enabling innovative network service delivery models. However, operational network service delivery solutions still need to be developed that actually exploit these technologies, especially at the multi-provider level. Indeed, the implementation of network functions as software running over a virtualized infrastructure and provisioned on a service basis let one envisage an ecosystem of network services that are dynamically and flexibly assembled by orchestrating Virtual Network Functions even across different provider domains, thereby coping with changeable user and service requirements and context conditions. In this paper we propose an approach that adopts Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) technology-agnostic architectural guidelines in the design of a solution for orchestrating and dynamically chaining Virtual Network Functions. We discuss how SOA, NFV, and SDN may complement each other in realizing dynamic network function chaining through service composition specification, service selection, service delivery, and placement tasks. Then, we describe the architecture of a SOA-inspired NFV orchestrator, which leverages SDN-based network control capabilities to address an effective delivery of elastic chains of Virtual Network Functions. Preliminary results of prototype implementation and testing activities are also presented. The benefits for Network Service Providers are also described that derive from the adaptive network service provisioning in a multi-provider environment through the orchestration of computing and networking services to provide end users with an enhanced service experience

RDCL 3D, a Model Agnostic Web Framework for the Design and Composition of NFV Services

We present RDCL 3D, a "model agnostic" web framework for the design and composition of NFV services and components. The framework allows editing and validating the descriptors of services and components both textually and graphically and supports the interaction with external orchestrators or with deployment and execution environments. RDCL 3D is open source and designed with a modular approach, allowing developers to "plug in" the support for new models. We describe several advances with respect to the NFV state of the art, which have been implemented with RDCL 3D. We have integrated in the platform the latest ETSI NFV ISG model specifications for which no parsers/validators were available. We have also included in the platform the support for OASIS TOSCA models, reusing existing parsers. Then we have considered the modelling of components in a modular software router (Click), which goes beyond the traditional scope of NFV. We have further developed this approach by combining traditional NFV components (Virtual Network Functions) and Click elements in a single model. Finally, we have considered the support of this solution using the Unikernels virtualization technology.Comment: Accepted pape