Quality of service assurance for the next generation Internet

The provisioning for multimedia applications has been of increasing interest among researchers and Internet Service Providers. Through the migration from resource-based to service-driven networks, it has become evident that the Internet model should be enhanced to provide support for a variety of differentiated services that match applications and customer requirements, and not stay limited under the flat best-effort service that is currently provided. In this paper, we describe and critically appraise the major achievements of the efforts to introduce Quality of Service (QoS) assurance and provisioning within the Internet model. We then propose a research path for the creation of a network services management architecture, through which we can move towards a QoS-enabled network environment, offering support for a variety of different services, based on traffic characteristics and user expectations

A Survey on the Contributions of Software-Defined Networking to Traffic Engineering

Since the appearance of OpenFlow back in 2008, software-defined networking (SDN) has gained momentum. Although there are some discrepancies between the standards developing organizations working with SDN about what SDN is and how it is defined, they all outline traffic engineering (TE) as a key application. One of the most common objectives of TE is the congestion minimization, where techniques such as traffic splitting among multiple paths or advanced reservation systems are used. In such a scenario, this manuscript surveys the role of a comprehensive list of SDN protocols in TE solutions, in order to assess how these protocols can benefit TE. The SDN protocols have been categorized using the SDN architecture proposed by the open networking foundation, which differentiates among data-controller plane interfaces, application-controller plane interfaces, and management interfaces, in order to state how the interface type in which they operate influences TE. In addition, the impact of the SDN protocols on TE has been evaluated by comparing them with the path computation element (PCE)-based architecture. The PCE-based architecture has been selected to measure the impact of SDN on TE because it is the most novel TE architecture until the date, and because it already defines a set of metrics to measure the performance of TE solutions. We conclude that using the three types of interfaces simultaneously will result in more powerful and enhanced TE solutions, since they benefit TE in complementary ways.European Commission through the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (GN4) under Grant 691567 Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the Secure Deployment of Services Over SDN and NFV-based Networks Project S&NSEC under Grant TEC2013-47960-C4-3-

Service-Oriented Multigranular Optical Network Architecture for Clouds

This paper presents a novel service-oriented network architecture to bridge the informational gap between user applications and optical networks providing technology-agnostic multigranular optical network services for clouds. A mediation layer (service plane) between user applications and network control is proposed to facilitate a mapping process between user application requests and the network services. At the network level, a multigranular optical network (MGON) is proposed and implemented to support dynamic wavelength and subwavelength granularities with different transport formats [optical burst switched (OBS), optical burst transport (OBT)], reservation protocols (one-way, two-way), and different quality-of-service (QoS) levels per service type. The service-oriented multigranular optical network has been designed, implemented, and demonstrated on an experimental testbed. The testbed consists of service and network resource provisioning, service abstraction, and network resource virtualization. The service-to-network interoperation is provided by means of a gateway that maps service requests to technology-specific parameters and a common signaling channel for both service and network resource provisioning

Service level agreement framework for differentiated survivability in GMPLS-based IP-over-optical networks

In the next generation optical internet, GMPLS based IP-over-optical networks, ISPs will be required to support a wide variety of applications each having their own requirements. These requirements are contracted by means of the SLA. This paper describes a recovery framework that may be included in the SLA contract between ISP and customers in order to provide the required level of survivability. A key concern with such a recovery framework is how to present the different survivability alternatives including recovery techniques, failure scenario and layered integration into a transparent manner for customers. In this paper, two issues are investigated. First, the performance of the recovery framework when applying a proposed mapping procedure as an admission control mechanism in the edge router considering a smart-edge simple-core GMPLS-based IP/WDM network is considered. The second issue pertains to the performance of a pre-allocated restoration and its ability to provide protected connections under different failure scenarios