Network performance of multiple virtual machine live migration in cloud federations

The idea of pay-per-use computing incarnated by the cloud paradigm is gaining a lot of success, both for entertainment and business applications. As a consequence, the demand for computing, storage and communication resources to be deployed in data center infrastructures is increasing dramatically. This trend is fostering new forms of infrastructure sharing such as cloud federations, where the excess workload is smartly distributed across multiple data centers, following some kind of mutual agreement among the participating cloud providers. Federated clouds can obtain great advantages from virtualization technologies and, in particular, from multiple virtual machine live migration techniques, which allow to flexibly move bulk workload across heterogeneous computing environments with minimal service disruption. However, a quantitative characterization of the performance of the inter-data center network infrastructure underlying the cloud federation is essential to guarantee user's quality of service and optimize provider's resource utilization. The main contribution of this paper is the definition and application of an analytical model for dimensioning inter-data center network capacity in order to achieve some given performance levels, assuming some simple multiple virtual machine live migration strategies. An extensive set of results are provided that allow to understand the impact of the many parameters involved in the design of a cloud federation network

Virtual Networking Performance in OpenStack Platform for Network Function Virtualization

The emerging Network Function Virtualization (NFV) paradigm, coupled with the highly flexible and programmatic control of network devices offered by Software Defined Networking solutions, enables unprecedented levels of network virtualization that will definitely change the shape of future network architectures, where legacy telco central offices will be replaced by cloud data centers located at the edge. On the one hand, this software-centric evolution of telecommunications will allow network operators to take advantage of the increased flexibility and reduced deployment costs typical of cloud computing. On the other hand, it will pose a number of challenges in terms of virtual network performance and customer isolation. This paper intends to provide some insights on how an open-source cloud computing platform such as OpenStack implements multitenant network virtualization and how it can be used to deploy NFV, focusing in particular on packet forwarding performance issues. To this purpose, a set of experiments is presented that refer to a number of scenarios inspired by the cloud computing and NFV paradigms, considering both single tenant and multitenant scenarios. From the results of the evaluation it is possible to highlight potentials and limitations of running NFV on OpenStack

From IoT to Cloud: Applications and Performance of the MQTT Protocol

A study of the MQTT publish/subscribe protocol with different QoS levels is presented with the aim to extend the Internet of Things (IoT) concept across access, edge and transport networks and reach cloud computing facilities. A simple testbed is set up with related software components to measure the end-to-end delivery latency between the publisher and the subscribers and the impact of the network delay caused by network configurations with different service deployments. In particular, the latency is shown to rise up to more than 7 times the average network delay when the QoS 2 level is applied, thus indicating that its adoption must be carefully considered

NFV Platforms: Taxonomy, Design Choices and Future Challenges

Due to the intrinsically inefficient service provisioning in traditional networks, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) keeps gaining attention from both industry and academia. By replacing the purpose-built, expensive, proprietary network equipment with software network functions consolidated on commodity hardware, NFV envisions a shift towards a more agile and open service provisioning paradigm. During the last few years, a large number of NFV platforms have been implemented in production environments that typically face critical challenges, including the development, deployment, and management of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). Nonetheless, just like any complex system, such platforms commonly consist of abounding software and hardware components and usually incorporate disparate design choices based on distinct motivations or use cases. This broad collection of convoluted alternatives makes it extremely arduous for network operators to make proper choices. Although numerous efforts have been devoted to investigating different aspects of NFV, none of them specifically focused on NFV platforms or attempted to explore their design space. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on the NFV platform design. Our study solely targets existing NFV platform implementations. We begin with a top-down architectural view of the standard reference NFV platform and present our taxonomy of existing NFV platforms based on what features they provide in terms of a typical network function life cycle. Then we thoroughly explore the design space and elaborate on the implementation choices each platform opts for. We also envision future challenges for NFV platform design in the incoming 5G era. We believe that our study gives a detailed guideline for network operators or service providers to choose the most appropriate NFV platform based on their respective requirements. Our work also provides guidelines for implementing new NFV platforms

On-demand Service Deployment Strategies for Fog-as-a-Service Scenarios

Service deployment at the network edge is a promising area that has been studied recently in the literature. In this work we have investigated a Fog-as-a-Service scenario, where multiple Server Fog Nodes (SFNs) can serve multiple Client Fog Nodes (CFNs) by exploiting different service deployment models, i.e., SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS, in a flexible way. The system has been modeled as a Size-Constrained Weighted Set Cover Problem aiming at maximizing the amount of satisfied CFNs exploiting a heterogeneous service deployment architecture, while minimizing the service completion time in a computation offloading scenario. In the simulation results section, we analyze the performance of different methods in terms of percentage of CFNs’ offloading requests satisfaction and offloading delay

Constraint Programming for Flexible Service Function Chaining Deployment

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) are technologies that recently acquired a great momentum thanks to their promise of being a flexible and cost-effective solution for replacing hardware-based, vendor-dependent network middleboxes with software appliances running on general purpose hardware in the cloud. Delivering end-to-end networking services across multiple NFV/SDN network domains by implementing the so-called Service Function Chain (SFC) i.e., a sequence of Virtual Network Functions (VNF) that composes the service, is a challenging task. In this paper we address two crucial sub-problems of this task: i) the language to formalize the request of a given SFC to the network and ii) the solution of the SFC design problem, once the request is received. As for i) in our solution the request is built upon the intent-based approach, with a syntax that focuses on asking the user what she needs and not how it should be implemented, in a simple and high level language. Concerning ii) we define a formal model describing network architectures and VNF properties that is then used to solve the SFC design problem by means of Constraint Programming (CP), a programming paradigm which is often used in Artificial Intelligence applications. We argue that CP can be effectively used to address this kind of problems because it provides very expressive and flexible modeling languages which come with powerful solvers, thus providing efficient and scalable performance. We substantiate this claim by validating our tool on some typical and non trivial SFC design problems

PI-OBS: a Parallel Iterative Optical Burst Scheduler for OBS networks

This paper presents the PI-OBS algorithm, a parallel-iterative scheduler for OBS nodes. Conventional schemes are greedy in the sense that they process headers one by one. In PI-OBS, all the headers received during a given time window are jointly processed to optimize the delay and output wavelength allocation, applying void filling techniques, and allowing traffic differentiation. Results show a similar or better performance than the LAUC-VF algorithm, commonly used as a performance bound for OBS schedulers. The PI-OBS scheduler has been designed to allow parallel electronic implementation similar to the ones in VOQ schedulers, with a deterministic response time.This research has been partially supported by the MEC projects TEC2007-67966-01/TCM CON-PARTE-1, and TEC2008-02552-E, and it is also developed in the framework of "Programa de Ayudas a Grupos de Excelencia de la R. de Murcia, F. Séneca"

FOG-oriented Joint Computing and Networking: the GAUChO Project Vision

This paper presents a novel architectural principle for distributed and heterogeneous systems integrating Fog Computing and Networking approaches, which has been proposed within the “Green Adaptive Fog Computing and Networking Architecture” (GAUChO) project, funded by the MIUR Progetti di Ricerca di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale (PRIN) Bando 2015 - grant 2015YPXH4W-004. In particular a modular and flexible platform has been designed and developed, supporting low-latency and energy-efficiency applications as well as security, self-adaptation, and spectrum efficiency by means of a strict collaboration among devices. Specifically, the focus here is on the design of an integrated protocol architecture supporting mobile Fog-oriented services, and the developed Fog computing testbeds

Intent-based management and orchestration of heterogeneous openflow/IoT SDN domains

One of the main challenges in delivering end-toend service chains across multiple Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) domains is to achieve unified management and orchestration functions. A very critical aspect is the definition of an open, vendoragnostic, and interoperable northbound interface (NBI) that should be as abstracted as possible from domain-specific data and control plane technologies. In this paper we propose a reference architecture and an intent-based NBI for end-to-end service orchestration across multiple technological domains. In particular, we consider the use case of an Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure deployment and the corresponding cloudbased data collection, processing, and publishing services with quality differentiation.We also report the experimental validation of the proposed architecture over a heterogeneous OpenFlow/IoT SDN test bed

Modeling Digital Twins of Kubernetes-Based Applications

Kubernetes provides several functions that can help service providers to deal with the management of complex container-based applications. However, most of these functions need a time-consuming and costly customization process to address service-specific requirements. The adoption of Digital Twin (DT) solutions can ease the configuration process by enabling the evaluation of multiple configurations and custom policies by means of simulation-based what-if scenario analysis. To facilitate this process, this paper proposes KubeTwin, a framework to enable the definition and evaluation of DTs of Kubernetes applications. Specifically, this work presents an in- novative simulation-based inference approach to define accurate DT models for a Kubernetes environment. We experimentally validate the proposed solution by implementing a DT model of an image recognition application that we tested under different conditions to verify the accuracy of the DT model. The soundness of these results demonstrates the validity of the KubeTwin approach and calls for further investigation