Combinatorial Auction-Based Resource Allocation in the Fog

Network service composition is becoming increasingly flexible, thanks in part to advances in virtualisation and cloud technologies. As these penetrate further into networks, providers are often looking to leverage this infrastructure to improve their service delivery. This desire poses a number of obstacles, including a diversity in device capabilities and the need for a value exchange mechanism. In this demonstration, we present a platform that seeks to address a selection of these challenges

Siren:a platform for deployment of VNFs in distributed infrastructures

Fog computing is conceiving an Internet where general purpose compute is ubiquitous, in turn this is providing new infrastructures for Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV). However, current NFV designs focus on the Cloud, resulting in broken and suboptimal deployments when deploying to the Fog. Through a case study with preliminary results, this paper presents the e ectiveness of Siren: a new prototype platform designed as a tool to deploy and manage Virtual Network Functions in Fog environments

Siren:A platform for deploying virtual network services in the cloud to Fog continuum

The burden put on network infrastructures is changing. The increasing number of connected devices, along with growing demand, are creating an unsustainable future for the Internet. The recently introduced concept of Fog computing predicts a future Internet where general compute power is ubiquitous, extending the Cloud right the way to the network edge. In turn, this acts as a catalyst for Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV), increasing the potential infrastructure locations for deploying new services, specifically ones that can cater to the demands of the changing Internet. However, current realisations of NFV typically host network functions in homogeneous, centralised servers in Cloud infrastructures. This is in contrast to the Fog where environments are both distributed and heterogeneous, thus current management and orchestration platforms suffer from suboptimal service deployment. With the use of a multiple use cases, and a novel auctioning orchestration method, this paper presents Siren, which is an orchestrator for network functions in the Cloud to Fog continuum

Digital Authoring of Interactive Public Display Applications

HbbTV (Hybrid broadcast broadband TV) is an emerging force in the entertainment industry, and proper standarisation of technologies would be hugely beneficial for the creation of content. HbbTV aims to realise this vision and has been widely successful thus far. This paper introduces the MPAT (Multi Platform Application Toolkit) project, which is the result of multiple organisational entities effort and dedication to extend the capabilities and functionality of HbbTV, in order to ease the design and creation of interactive TV applications. The paper also showcases the versatility of MPAT, by describing a series of case studies which provide digital storytelling and visual authoring of interactive applications which transcend traditional TV use cases, and instead provide a gripping interactive experience via integration with public displays

It bends but would it break?:topological analysis of BGP infrastructures in Europe

The Internet is often thought to be a model of resilience, due to a decentralised, organically-grown architecture. This paper puts this perception into perspective through the results of a security analysis of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing infrastructure. BGP is a fundamental Internet protocol and its intrinsic fragilities have been highlighted extensively in the literature. A seldom studied aspect is how robust the BGP infrastructure actually is as a result of nearly three decades of perpetual growth. Although global black-outs seem unlikely, local security events raise growing concerns on the robustness of the backbone. In order to better protect this critical infrastructure, it is crucial to understand its topology in the context of the weaknesses of BGP and to identify possible security scenarios. Firstly, we establish a comprehensive threat model that classifies main attack vectors, including but non limited to BGP vulnerabilities. We then construct maps of the European BGP backbone based on publicly available routing data. We analyse the topology of the backbone and establish several disruption scenarios that highlight the possible consequences of different types of attacks, for different attack capabilities. We also discuss existing mitigation and recovery strategies, and we propose improvements to enhance the robustness and resilience of the backbone. To our knowledge, this study is the first to combine a comprehensive threat analysis of BGP infrastructures withadvanced network topology considerations. We find that the BGP infrastructure is at higher risk than already understood, due to topologies that remain vulnerable to certain targeted attacks as a result of organic deployment over the years. Significant parts of the system are still uncharted territory, which warrants further investigation in this direction

Improving interactive TV experience using second screen mobile applications

The past two decades have seen a shift in the multimedia consumption behaviours from that of collectivism and passivity, to individualism and activity. This paper introduces the architectural design, implementation and user evaluation of a second screen application, which is designed to supersede the traditional user control interface for primary screen interaction. We describe how NSMobile, our second screen application, can be used as a pervasive multimedia platform by integrating user experiences on both the second screen and primary screen. The quantitative and qualitative evaluation of user interactions with interactive TV content also contributes to the future design of second screen applications

Baguette:towards end-to-end service orchestration in heterogeneous networks

Network services are the key mechanism for operators to introduce intelligence and generate profit from their infrastructures. The growth of the number of network users and the stricter application network requirements have highlighted a number of challenges in orchestrating services using existing production management and configuration protocols and mechanisms. Recent networking paradigms like Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV), provide a set of novel control and management interfaces that enable unprecedented automation, flexibility and openness capabilities in operator infrastructure management. This paper presents Baguette, a novel and open service orchestration framework for operators. Baguette supports a wide range of network technologies, namely optical and wired Ethernet technologies, and allows service providers to automate the deployment and dynamic re-optimization of network services. We present the design of the orchestrator and elaborate on the integration of Baguette with existing low-level network and cloud management frameworks

Network service orchestration standardization:a technology survey

Network services underpin operator revenues, and value-added services provide income beyond core (voice and data) infrastructure capability. Today, operators face multiple challenges: a need to innovate and offer a wider choice of value-added services, whilst increasing network scale, bandwidth and flexibility. They must also reduce operational costs, and deploy services far faster - in minutes rather than days or weeks. In the recent years, the network community, motivated by the aforementioned challenges, has developed production network architectures and seeded technologies, like Software Defined Networking, Application-based Network Operations and Network Function Virtualization. These technologies enhance the highly desired properties for elasticity, agility and cost-effectiveness in the operator environment. A key requirement to fully exploit the benefits of these new architectures and technologies is a fundamental shift in management and control of resources, and the ability to orchestrate the network infrastructure: coordinate the instantiation of high-level network services across different technological domains and automate service deployment and re-optimization. This paper surveys existing standardization efforts for the orchestration - automation, coordination, and management - of complex set of network and function resources (both physical and virtual), and highlights the various enabling technologies, strengths and weaknesses, adoption challenges for operators, and areas where further research is required

Having Fun With Evaluation

This paper briefly considers some issues in the evaluation of HCI applications through documenting the use and evaluation of a digital video tool - StoriXXX - used for editing digital resources for 'digital storytelling' and comments on its multiple use as a form of 'bricolage'. It provides a brief overview of use and evaluation in two community contexts, as part of a long term engagement in creating digital storytelling applications, drawing from elements of film and media practice to point to various interpretations of story creation that also provide insights into the evaluation process in HCI

Ethical challenges in collaborative storytelling

Collaborative storytelling using user generated audio-visual narratives is becoming a popular medium for creative social sharing, hyper-local TV, and collective awareness. Through two storytelling user experiments, we recognized that the challenges around ethics and copyrights in managing user data are far more pressing than the simple technical feasibilities of a storytelling platform. Recognizing the importance of some actual and anticipated ethical problems we attempted to address the issue in our experiments using purpose-built technical features and a specifically designed consent form as the code of conduct. The resultant platform effectively maintains the life-cycle and dependencies of the narratives and composite user stories