HARMLESS: Cost-Effective Transitioning to SDN

Recently, Software-Defined Networking has grown out of being an "intriguing approach" and turned into a "must-have" for communication networks to overcome many long-standing problems of traditional networking. However, there are still some obstacles on the way to the widespread adoption. Current commodity-off-the-shelf (COTS) SDN offerings are still in their infancy and are notorious for lacking standards compliance, scalability, and unpredictable performance indicators compared to their legacy counterparts. On the other hand, recent software-based solutions might mitigate these shortcomings, but in terms of cost-efficiency and port density they are in a lower league. Here, we present HARMLESS, a novel SDN switch design that combines the rapid innovation and upgrade cycles of software switches with the port density of hardware-based appliances into a fully data plane-transparent, vendor-neutral and cost-effective solution for smaller enterprises to gain a foothold in this era. The demo showcases the SDN migration of a dumb legacy Ethernet switch to a powerful, fully reconfigurable, OpenFlow-enabled network device without incurring any major performance and latency penalty, nor any substantial price tag enabling to realize many use cases that would have otherwise needed standalone hardware appliances

Energy Demand Shifting in Residential Households: The Interdependence between Social Practices and Technology Design

Emerging energy technologies, such as smart meters and solar photovoltaic systems (solar PV), are changing our relationship to energy. There is increasing evidence that households with solar PV on their roof tend naturally to shift their energy consumption in time to match their local generation, but what do people actually do to achieve this and how ICT can support them to optimize their consumption? In this paper we present a year-long user study to understand social practices around laundry routines and local energy generation. We highlight four challenges for the next generation of home energy management systems

A Surface-based In-House Network Medium for Power, Communication and Interaction

Recent advances in communication and signal processing methodologies have paved the way for a high speed home network Power Line Communication (PLC) system. The development of powerline communications and powerline control as a cost effective and rapid mechanism for delivering communication and control services are becoming attractive in PLC application, to determine the best mix of hard and software to support infrastructure development for particular applications using power line communication. Integrating appliances in the home through a wired network often proves to be impractical: routing cables is usually difficult, changing the network structure afterwards even more so, and portable devices can only be connected at fixed connection points. Wireless networks aren’t the answer either: batteries have to be regularly replaced or changed, and what they add to the device’s size and weight might be disproportionate for smaller appliances. In Pin&Play, we explore a design space in between typical wired and wireless networks, investigating the use of surfaces to network objects that are attached to it. This article gives an overview of the network model, and describes functioning prototypes that were built as a proof of concept. The first phase of the development is already demonstrated both in appropriate conferences and publications. [1] The intention of researchers is to introduce this work to powerline community; as this research enters phase II of the Pin&Play architecture to investigate, develop prototype systems, and conduct studies in two concrete application areas. The first area is user-centric and concerned with support for collaborative work on large surfaces. The second area is focused on exhibition spaces and trade fairs, and concerned with combination of physical media such as movable walls and digital infrastructure for fast deployment of engaging installations. In this paper we have described the functionality of the Pin&Play architecture and introduced the second phase together with future plans. Figure 1 shows technical approach, using a surface with simple layered structure Pushpin connectors, dual pin or coaxial

Container-based network function virtualization for software-defined networks

Today's enterprise networks almost ubiquitously deploy middlebox services to improve in-network security and performance. Although virtualization of middleboxes attracts a significant attention, studies show that such implementations are still proprietary and deployed in a static manner at the boundaries of organisations, hindering open innovation. In this paper, we present an open framework to create, deploy and manage virtual network functions (NF)s in OpenFlow-enabled networks. We exploit container-based NFs to achieve low performance overhead, fast deployment and high reusability missing from today's NFV deployments. Through an SDN northbound API, NFs can be instantiated, traffic can be steered through the desired policy chain and applications can raise notifications. We demonstrate the systems operation through the development of exemplar NFs from common Operating System utility binaries, and we show that container-based NFV improves function instantiation time by up to 68% over existing hypervisor-based alternatives, and scales to one hundred co-located NFs while incurring sub-millisecond latency

Large UK retailers' initiatives to reduce consumers' emissions: a systematic assessment

In the interest of climate change mitigation, policy makers, businesses and non-governmental organisations have devised initiatives designed to reduce in-use emissions whilst, at the same time, the number of energy-consuming products in homes, and household energy consumption, is increasing. Retailers are important because they are at the interface between manufacturers of products and consumers and they supply the vast majority of consumer goods in developed countries like the UK, including energy using products. Large retailers have a consistent history of corporate responsibility reporting and have included plans and actions to influence consumer emissions within them. This paper adapts two frameworks to use them for systematically assessing large retailers’ initiatives aimed at reducing consumers’ carbon emissions. The Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development (FSSD) is adapted and used to analyse the strategic scope and coherence of these initiatives in relation to the businesses’ sustainability strategies. The ISM ‘Individual Social Material’ framework is adapted and used to analyse how consumer behaviour change mechanisms are framed by retailers. These frameworks are used to analyse eighteen initiatives designed to reduce consumer emissions from eight of the largest UK retail businesses, identified from publicly available data. The results of the eighteen initiatives analysed show that the vast majority were not well planned nor were they strategically coherent. Secondly, most of these specific initiatives relied solely on providing information to consumers and thus deployed a rather narrow range of consumer behaviour change mechanisms. The research concludes that leaders of retail businesses and policy makers could use the FSSD to ensure processes, and measurements are comprehensive and integrated, in order to increase the materiality and impact of their initiatives to reduce consumer emissions in use. Furthermore, retailers could benefit from exploring different models of behaviour change from the ISM framework in order to access a wider set of tools for transformative system change

Electromechanical Systems in Building Services Engineering

There are myriad of electromechanical systems in domestics, commercial and industrial buildings. Part or most of these systems hardware are hidden from the public though they do account for between 50% to 75% of the total construction cost and take up to 15% of the building volume. This paper is aimed at enumerating their functions as a prerequisite for designing (including modelling and simulation), selecting, integrating, managing and reduction in energy usage. The electromechanical systems included in this paper are cold and hot water supplies, heating, ventilation, air conditioning, drainage, sanitation, refuse and sewage disposal, gas, electricity, access control, communication, oil installation, fire fighting and transportatio