Genetic Algorithm-based Mapper to Support Multiple Concurrent Users on Wireless Testbeds

Communication and networking research introduces new protocols and standards with an increasing number of researchers relying on real experiments rather than simulations to evaluate the performance of their new protocols. A number of testbeds are currently available for this purpose and a growing number of users are requesting access to those testbeds. This motivates the need for better utilization of the testbeds by allowing concurrent experimentations. In this work, we introduce a novel mapping algorithm that aims to maximize wireless testbed utilization using frequency slicing of the spectrum resources. The mapper employs genetic algorithm to find the best combination of requests that can be served concurrently, after getting all possible mappings of each request via an induced sub-graph isomorphism stage. The proposed mapper is tested on grid testbeds and randomly generated topologies. The solution of our mapper is compared to the optimal one, obtained through a brute-force search, and was able to serve the same number of requests in 82.96% of testing scenarios. Furthermore, we show the effect of the careful design of testbed topology on enhancing the testbed utilization by applying our mapper on a carefully positioned 8-nodes testbed. In addition, our proposed approach for testbed slicing and requests mapping has shown an improved performance in terms of total served requests, about five folds, compared to the simple allocation policy with no slicing.Comment: IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC) 201

Evaluating the impact of delay constraints in network services for intelligent network slicing based on SKM model

© 2021 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Solving the problem of network resource allocation with delay constraint is a significant challenge for realizing future Internet and 5G networks services such as advanced mobile broadband services and Internet of things (IoT), especially under the network slicing scenario. The impact of delay constraints may lead to rejection of demands, resulting in low resource utilization of network resources. This is especially severe when dynamic traffic is considered. Therefore, intelligent resource allocation algorithms are required to use the network resources in delay constrained scenario efficiently. Moreover, these algorithms should guarantee quality of service (QoS) between different priority slices during congestion case. Therefore, in this paper, we analyze the impact of delay constraint on the performance of an online resource allocation algorithm based on an intelligent efficient squatting and kicking model (SKM), proved in other works to be the most effective up to the present time yet. SKM incorporates kicking and squatting of resources as innovative techniques enabling it to achieve 100% resource utilization and acceptance ratio for higher priority slices in scenarios where the other state of art algorithms not able to reach by far in some scenarios. Simulation results showed that incorporating delay constraints has a significant impact on the performance, resulting in up to 10% and 4% reduction in terms of average resource utilization and acceptance ratios respectively.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Deliverable DJRA1.2. Solutions and protocols proposal for the network control, management and monitoring in a virtualized network context

This deliverable presents several research proposals for the FEDERICA network, in different subjects, such as monitoring, routing, signalling, resource discovery, and isolation. For each topic one or more possible solutions are elaborated, explaining the background, functioning and the implications of the proposed solutions.This deliverable goes further on the research aspects within FEDERICA. First of all the architecture of the control plane for the FEDERICA infrastructure will be defined. Several possibilities could be implemented, using the basic FEDERICA infrastructure as a starting point. The focus on this document is the intra-domain aspects of the control plane and their properties. Also some inter-domain aspects are addressed. The main objective of this deliverable is to lay great stress on creating and implementing the prototype/tool for the FEDERICA slice-oriented control system using the appropriate framework. This deliverable goes deeply into the definition of the containers between entities and their syntax, preparing this tool for the future implementation of any kind of algorithm related to the control plane, for both to apply UPB policies or to configure it by hand. We opt for an open solution despite the real time limitations that we could have (for instance, opening web services connexions or applying fast recovering mechanisms). The application being developed is the central element in the control plane, and additional features must be added to this application. This control plane, from the functionality point of view, is composed by several procedures that provide a reliable application and that include some mechanisms or algorithms to be able to discover and assign resources to the user. To achieve this, several topics must be researched in order to propose new protocols for the virtual infrastructure. The topics and necessary features covered in this document include resource discovery, resource allocation, signalling, routing, isolation and monitoring. All these topics must be researched in order to find a good solution for the FEDERICA network. Some of these algorithms have started to be analyzed and will be expanded in the next deliverable. Current standardization and existing solutions have been investigated in order to find a good solution for FEDERICA. Resource discovery is an important issue within the FEDERICA network, as manual resource discovery is no option, due to scalability requirement. Furthermore, no standardization exists, so knowledge must be obtained from related work. Ideally, the proposed solutions for these topics should not only be adequate specifically for this infrastructure, but could also be applied to other virtualized networks.Postprint (published version

Defining and Surveying Wireless Link Virtualization and Wireless Network Virtualization

Virtualization is a topic of great interest in the area of mobile and wireless communication systems. However, the term virtualization is used in an inexact manner which makes it difficult to compare and contrast work that has been carried out to date. The purpose of this paper is twofold. In the first place, this paper develops a formal theory for defining virtualization. In the second instance, this theory is used as a way of surveying a body of work in the field of wireless link virtualization, a subspace of wireless network virtualization. The formal theory provides a means for distinguishing work that should be classed as resource allocation as distinct from virtualization. It also facilitates a further classification of the representation level at which the virtualization occurs, which makes comparison of work more meaningful. This paper provides a comprehensive survey and highlights gaps in the research that make for fruitful future work

Virtualized Network Graph Design and Embedding Model to Minimize Provisioning Cost

The provisioning cost of a virtualized network (VN) depends on several factors, including the numbers of virtual routers (VRs) and virtual links (VLs), mapping of them on a substrate infrastructure, and routing of data traffic. An existing model, known as the virtual network embedding (VNE) model, determines the embedding of given VN graphs into the substrate infrastructure. When the resource allocation model of the VNE problem is adopted to a single-entity scenario, where a single entity fulfills the roles of both a service provider and an infrastructure provider, an issue of increased costs of VNs and access paths arise. This paper proposes a model for virtualized network graph design and embedding (VNDE) for the single-entity scenario. The VNDE model determines the number of VRs and a VN graph for each request in conjunction with embedding. The VNDE model also determines access paths that connect customer premises and VRs. We formulate the VNDE model as an integer linear programming (ILP) problem. We develop heuristic algorithms for the cases where the ILP problem cannot be solved in practical time. We evaluate the performance of the VNDE model on several networks, including an actual Japanese academic backbone network. Numerical results show that the proposed model designs suitable VN graphs and embeds them according to the volume of traffic demands and access path cost. Compared with the benchmark model, which is based on a classic VNE approach, the proposed model reduces the provisioning cost at most 28.7% in our examined scenarios

A policy-based architecture for virtual network embedding

Network virtualization is a technology that enables multiple virtual instances to coexist on a common physical network infrastructure. This paradigm fostered new business models, allowing infrastructure providers to lease or share their physical resources. Each virtual network is isolated and can be customized to support a new class of customers and applications. To this end, infrastructure providers need to embed virtual networks on their infrastructure. The virtual network embedding is the (NP-hard) problem of matching constrained virtual networks onto a physical network. Heuristics to solve the embedding problem have exploited several policies under different settings. For example, centralized solutions have been devised for small enterprise physical networks, while distributed solutions have been proposed over larger federated wide-area networks. In this thesis we present a policy-based architecture for the virtual network embedding problem. By policy, we mean a variant aspect of any of the three (invariant) embedding mechanisms: physical resource discovery, virtual network mapping, and allocation on the physical infrastructure. Our architecture adapts to different scenarios by instantiating appropriate policies, and has bounds on embedding efficiency, and on convergence embedding time, over a single provider, or across multiple federated providers. The performance of representative novel and existing policy configurations are compared via extensive simulations, and over a prototype implementation. We also present an object model as a foundation for a protocol specification, and we release a testbed to enable users to test their own embedding policies, and to run applications within their virtual networks. The testbed uses a Linux system architecture to reserve virtual node and link capacities

Online power aware coordinated virtual network embedding with 5G delay constraint

Solving virtual network embedding problem with delay constraint is a key challenge to realize network virtualization for current and future 5G core networks. It is an NP-Hard problem, composed of two sub-problems, one for virtual node embedding, and another one for virtual edges embedding, usually solved separately or with a certain level of coordination, which in general could result on rejecting some virtualization requests. Therefore, the main contributions of this paper focused on introducing an online power aware algorithm to solve the virtual network embedding problem using less resources and less power consumption, while considering end-to-end delay as a main embedding constraint. The new algorithm minimizes the overall power of the physical network through efficiently maximizing the utilization of the active infrastructure resources and putting into sleeping mode all non-active ones. Evaluations of the proposed algorithm conducted against the state of art algorithms, and simulation results showed that, when end-to-end delay was not included the proposed online algorithm managed to reduce the total power consumption of the physical network by 23% lower than the online energy aware with dynamic demands VNE algorithm, EAD-VNE. However, when end-to-end delay was included, it significantly influenced the whole embedding process and resulted on reducing the average acceptance ratios by 16% compared to the cases without delay.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Survivable Virtual Network Embedding in Transport Networks

Network Virtualization (NV) is perceived as an enabling technology for the future Internet and the 5th Generation (5G) of mobile networks. It is becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with emerging applications’ Quality of Service (QoS) requirements in an ossified Internet. NV addresses the current Internet’s ossification problem by allowing the co-existence of multiple Virtual Networks (VNs), each customized to a specific purpose on the shared Internet. NV also facilitates a new business model, namely, Network-as-a-Service (NaaS), which provides a separation between applications and services, and the networks supporting them. 5G mobile network operators have adopted the NaaS model to partition their physical network resources into multiple VNs (also called network slices) and lease them to service providers. Service providers use the leased VNs to offer customized services satisfying specific QoS requirements without any investment in deploying and managing a physical network infrastructure. The benefits of NV come at additional resource management challenges. A fundamental problem in NV is to efficiently map the virtual nodes and virtual links of a VN to physical nodes and paths, respectively, known as the Virtual Network Embedding (VNE) problem. A VNE that can survive physical resource failures is known as the survivable VNE (SVNE) problem, and has received significant attention recently. In this thesis, we address variants of the SVNE problem with different bandwidth and reliability requirements for transport networks. Specifically, the thesis includes four main contributions. First, a connectivity-aware VNE approach that ensures VN connectivity without bandwidth guarantee in the face of multiple link failures. Second, a joint spare capacity allocation and VNE scheme that provides bandwidth guarantee against link failures by augmenting VNs with necessary spare capacity. Third, a generalized recovery mechanism to re-embed the VNs that are impacted by a physical node failure. Fourth, a reliable VNE scheme with dedicated protection that allows tuning of available bandwidth of a VN during a physical link failure. We show the effectiveness of the proposed SVNE schemes through extensive simulations. We believe that the thesis can set the stage for further research specially in the area of automated failure management for next generation networks