RAYGO: Reserve As You GO

The capability to predict the precise resource requirements of a microservice-based application is a very important problem for cloud services. In fact, the allocation of abundant resources guarantees an excellent quality of experience (QoE) for the hosted services, but it can translate into unnecessary costs for the cloud customer due to the reserved (but unused) resources. On the other side, poor resource provisioning may turn out in scarce performance when experiencing an unexpected peak of demand. This paper proposes RAYGO, a novel approach for dynamic resource provisioning to microservices in Kubernetes that (i) reliefs the customers from the definition of appropriate execution boundaries, (ii) ensures the right amount of resources at any time, according to the past and the predicted usage, and (iii) operates at the application level, acknowledging the dependency between multiple correlated microservices

A Disaggregated MEC Architecture Enabling Open Services and Novel Business Models

Network and Service Providers are exploring different exploitation strategies for the Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC), mainly motivated by the opportunities for saving costs and generating new revenues (e.g., through new business models). On the other hand, the overall standardization picture is still very fragmented, delaying or even jeopardizing the real exploitation of MEC; furthermore, current standardization efforts are mainly envisioning a traditional monolithic architecture, with many technological partners but a single administrative domain. This paper argues that a clear separation of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS levels for MEC, together with standardized interfaces, will help accelerating the development of new business roles (e.g., IaaS, PaaS and SaaS providers) and models, possibly replacing the current competition-oriented practices in the telco domain with new forms of cooperation, which are already starting to appear in the IT sector. In this direction, this paper proposes a disaggregated MEC architecture and presents two use cases that show how different categories of resources and services could be provided by infrastructure, platform and software providers in an evolutionary scenario towards 5G

Quantum Internet Protocol Stack: a Comprehensive Survey

Classical Internet evolved exceptionally during the last five decades, from a network comprising a few static nodes in the early days to a leviathan interconnecting billions of devices. This has been possible by the separation of concern principle, for which the network functionalities are organized as a stack of layers, each providing some communication functionalities through specific network protocols. In this survey, we aim at highlighting the impossibility of adapting the classical Internet protocol stack to the Quantum Internet, due to the marvels of quantum mechanics. Indeed, the design of the Quantum Internet requires a major paradigm shift of the whole protocol stack for harnessing the peculiarities of quantum entanglement and quantum information. In this context, we first overview the relevant literature about Quantum Internet protocol stack. Then, stemming from this, we sheds the light on the open problems and required efforts toward the design of an effective and complete Quantum Internet protocol stack. To the best of authors' knowledge, a survey of this type is the first of its own. What emerges from this analysis is that the Quantum Internet, though still in its infancy, is a disruptive technology whose design requires an inter-disciplinary effort at the border between quantum physics, computer and telecommunications engineering

Computing Without Borders: The Way Towards Liquid Computing

Despite the de-facto technological uniformity fostered by the cloud and edge computing paradigms, resource fragmentation across isolated clusters hinders the dynamism in application placement, leading to suboptimal performance and operational complexity. Building upon and extending these paradigms, we propose a novel approach envisioning a transparent continuum of resources and services on top of the underlying fragmented infrastructure, called liquid computing. Fully decentralized, multi-ownership-oriented and intent-driven, it enables an overarching abstraction for improved applications execution, while at the same time opening up for new scenarios, including resource sharing and brokering. Following the above vision, we present liqo, an open-source project that materializes this approach through the creation of dynamic and seamless Kubernetes multi-cluster topologies. Extensive experimental evaluations have shown its effectiveness in different contexts, both in terms of Kubernetes overhead and compared to other open-source alternatives

IEEE Software Defined Network Initiative

This paper outlines a proposal for setting up an IEEE initiative on software defined networks (SDNs) to facilitate professional and academic exchange of SDN-related ideas, research, and development. The proposal is a result of an intensive effort of a team consisting of the authors. After a comprehensive gap analysis, gaps and key opportunities were identified. Finally, a specific set of components along with schedule and financial consideration were proposed in the areas of publications, conferences, standards, education, certification, and publicity

A unifying orchestration operating platform for 5G

5G will revolutionize the way ICT and Telecommunications infrastructures work. Indeed, businesses can greatly benefit from innovation introduced by 5G and exploit the new deep integration between ICT and networking capabilities to generate new value-added services. Although a plethora of solutions for virtual resources and infrastructures management and orchestration already exists (e.g., OpenDaylight, ONOS, OpenStack, Apache Mesos, Open Source MANO, Docker Swarm, LXD/LXC, etc.), they are still not properly integrated to match the 5G requirements. In this paper, we present the 5G Operating Platform (5G-OP) which has been conceived to fill in this gap and integrate management, control and orchestration of computing, storage and networking resources down to the end-user devices and terminals (e.g., smart phone, machines, robots, drones, autonomous vehicles, etc.). The 5G-OP is an overarching framework capable to provide agnostic interfaces and a universal set of abstractions in order to implement seamless 5G infrastructure control and orchestration. The functional structure of the 5G-OP, including the horizontal and vertical interworking of functions in it, has been designed to allow Network Operators and Service Providers to exploit diverse roles and business strategies. Moreover, the functional decoupling of the 5G-OP from the underneath management, control and orchestration solutions allows pursuing faster innovation cycles, being ready for the emergence of new service models