An Application-aware SDN Controller for Hybrid Optical-electrical DC Networks

The adoption of optical switching technologies in Data Centre Networks (DCNs) offers a solution for high speed traffic and energy efficiency in Data Centre (DC) operational management, enabling an easy scaling of DC infrastructures. Flexible, slotted allocation of optical resources is fundamental to efficiently support the dynamicity of DC traffic. In this context, the NEPHELE project proposes a Time Division Multiple Access approach for optical resource allocation, orchestrated through a Software Defined Networking controller which coordinates the DCN configuration based on real-time cloud application requests

Reducing Complexity of Virtual Machine Networking

Virtualization is an enabling technology that improves scalability, reliability, and flexibility. Virtualized networking is tackled by emulating or paravirtualizing network interface cards. This approach, however, leads to complexities (implementation and management) and has to conform to some limitations imposed by the Ethernet standard. RINA turns the current approach to virtualized networking on its head: instead of emulating networks to perform inter-process communication on a single processing system, it sees networking as an extension to local inter-process communication. In this article, we show how RINA can leverage a paravirtualization approach to achieve a more manageable solution for virtualized networking. We also present experimental results performed on IRATI, the reference open source implementation of RINA, which shows the potential performance that can be achieved by deploying our solution

Orchestrating virtual slices in data centre infrastructures with optical DCN

The emergence of new paradigms and services is pushing the limits of nowadays cloud infrastructures. It is a fact that current solutions lack in the flexibility and configurability to adapt to heterogeneous requirements coming from the applications/services to be supported over them. This results most of the time in severe underutilization of the underlying physical substrate. In light of this, newer approaches on resource provisioning and infrastructure management are needed. The Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) paradigm is proposed as a solution to overcome these limitations. Thanks to IaaS, the physical infrastructure is partitioned onto virtual slices, encompassing heterogeneous resources (e.g. network, computing). Such a concept is expected to be harnessed by future data center (DC) infrastructures in order to cope efficiently with multi-tenancy as well as heterogeneous application requirements. However, current DC networks (DCNs) impose sever limitations onto traffic handling to fully exploit this vision. In light of this, optical technologies are seen as prime candidates for realizing the high performance network fabrics that future DC architectures will need. Under such an umbrella, it becomes primordial to develop specific provisioning solutions that account for the particularities of the optical medium, while providing the means to efficiently slice the DC infrastructure. With all of these in mind, in this article we present a solution for orchestrating and controlling virtual slices in a DC scenario with optical intra-DCN, with the scope of optimizing the underlying physical infrastructure utilization. The benefits of the presented solution are demonstrated against legacy architectures through exhaustive experiments and simulations.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

A survey of cloud services and potential applications of social awareness

The variety of emerging cloud services and applications manifests in a multitude of network and hardware requirements, but also in different service and traffic characteristics. Due to the popularity of clouds, a set of issues emerges for the different stakeholders involved in providing and delivering cloud services to the end user. Not only pure network layer optimization, but especially the new field of socially-aware traffic management seems promising to overcome these issues. In this paper, the applicability of social awareness to different types of cloud services is discussed. For that purpose, cloud applications are classified according to relevant technical and non-technical characteristics. Based on this novel classification scheme, the benefits and challenges of social awareness are discussed and examples for the optimization of cloud services are given

Orchestrating virtual slices in data centre infrastructures with optical DCN

The emergence of new paradigms and services is pushing the limits of nowadays cloud infrastructures. It is a fact that current solutions lack in the flexibility and configurability to adapt to heterogeneous requirements coming from the applications/services to be supported over them. This results most of the time in severe underutilization of the underlying physical substrate. In light of this, newer approaches on resource provisioning and infrastructure management are needed. The Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) paradigm is proposed as a solution to overcome these limitations. Thanks to IaaS, the physical infrastructure is partitioned onto virtual slices, encompassing heterogeneous resources (e.g. network, computing). Such a concept is expected to be harnessed by future data center (DC) infrastructures in order to cope efficiently with multi-tenancy as well as heterogeneous application requirements. However, current DC networks (DCNs) impose sever limitations onto traffic handling to fully exploit this vision. In light of this, optical technologies are seen as prime candidates for realizing the high performance network fabrics that future DC architectures will need. Under such an umbrella, it becomes primordial to develop specific provisioning solutions that account for the particularities of the optical medium, while providing the means to efficiently slice the DC infrastructure. With all of these in mind, in this article we present a solution for orchestrating and controlling virtual slices in a DC scenario with optical intra-DCN, with the scope of optimizing the underlying physical infrastructure utilization. The benefits of the presented solution are demonstrated against legacy architectures through exhaustive experiments and simulations.Peer Reviewe