Virtualization enables the building of multiple virtual networks over a shared substrate. One of the challenges to virtualisation is efficient resource allocation. This problem has been found to be NP hard. Therefore, most approaches to it have not only proposed static solutions, but have also made many assumptions to simplify it. In this paper, we propose a distributed, autonomic and artificial intelligence based solution to resource allocation. Our aim is to obtain self-configuring, selfoptimizing, self-healing and context aware virtual networks
This paper experimentally evaluates the effects of applying autonomic management to the scheduling of maintenance operations in a deployed Chord network, for various membership churn and workload patterns. Two versions of an autonomic management policy were compared with a static configuration. The autonomic policies varied with respect to the aggressiveness with which they responded to peer access error rates and to wasted maintenance operations. In most experiments, significant improvements due to autonomic management were observed in the performance of routing operations and the quantity of…
Complex Dynamic Networks can be exploited in solving problems where traditional solutions may not be sufficient. The increasing complexity of computer networks imposes problems to the current network management solutions. In this context, network management is an example of a research area that could benefit from the use of CDNs. However, the consistency of state of management data among the elements that build management CDNs (management nodes) is an important challenge. Traditional mechanisms to maintain consistency of these states are supported by some centralization which wastes some desir…
In Resilient IoT, the revenue of service provider is resilient to uncertain usage-contexts(e.g. emotion, environmental contexts) of Smart-device users. Hence, Autonomic Resilient IoT Management problem is decomposed into two subproblems, namely m-connectivity and k-dominance, such that m-alternations on revenue making process is resilient to users common interests, which might be depicted through k-1 alternations of usage-contexts. In this context, a greedy approximation scheme Bee is proposed, which resolves aforementioned sub-problems with five consecutive models, namely Maverick, Siren, Pig…
In Happy IoT, the revenue of service providers synchronizes to the unobservable and dynamic usage-contexts (e.g. emotion, environmental information, etc.) of Smart-device users. Hence, the usage-context-estimation from the unreliable Smart-device sensed data is justified as an unsupervised and non-linear optimization problem. Accordingly, Autonomic Happy IoT Management is aimed at attracting initial user-groups based on the common interests (i.e. recruitment ), then uncovering their latent usage-contexts from unreliable sensed data (i.e. revenue-renewal ) and synchronizing to usage-context dyn…
Smart cities are an actual trend being pursued by research that, fundamentally, tries to improve city's management on behalf of a better human quality of live. This paper proposes a new autonomic complementary approach for smart cities management. It is argued that smart city management systems with autonomic characteristics will improve and facilitate management functionalities in general. A framework is also presented as use case considering specific application scenarios like smart-health, smart-grid, smart-environment and smart-streets.
Machine learning (ML) techniques are being increasingly used in mobile networks for network planning, operation, management, optimisation and much more. These techniques are realised using a set of logical nodes known as ML pipeline. A single network operator might have thousands of such ML pipelines distributed across its network. These pipelines need to be managed and orchestrated across network domains. Thus it is essential to have autonomic multi-domain orchestration of ML pipelines in mobile networks. International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has provided an architectural framework for…
Agile recovery from link failures in autonomic communication networks is essential to increase robustness, accessibility, and reliability of data transmission. However, this must be done with the least amount of protection resources, while using simple management plane functionality. Recently, network coding has been proposed as a solution to provide agile and cost efficient network self-healing against link failures, in a manner that does not require data rerouting, packet retransmission, or failure localization, hence leading to simple control and management planes. To achieve this, separate…
Bandwidth Allocation Models (BAMs) are resource allocation methods used for networks in general. BAMs are currently applied for handling resources such as bandwidth allocation in MPLS DS-TE networks (LSP setup). In general, BAMs defines resource restrictions by class and allocate the available resources on demand. This is frequently necessary to manage large and complex systems like routing networks. GBAM is a new generalized BAM that, by configuration, incorporates the behavior of existing BAMs (MAM, RDM, G-RDM and AllocTC-Sharing). In effect, any current available BAM behavior is reproduced …
Software Defined Networking has unfolded a new area of opportunity in distributed networking and intelligent networks. There has been a great interest in performing machine learning in distributed setting, exploiting the abstraction of SDN which makes it easier to write complex ML queries on standard control plane. However, most of the research has been made towards specialized problems (security, performance improvement, middlebox management etc) and not towards a generic framework. Also, existing tools and software require specialized knowledge of the algorithm/network to operate or monitor …
Management is a complex task in today's heterogeneous and large scale networks like Cloud, IoT, vehicular and MPLS networks. Likewise, researchers and developers envision the use of artificial intelligence techniques to create cognitive and autonomic management tools that aim better assist and enhance the management process cycle. Bandwidth allocation models (BAMs) are a resource allocation solution for networks that need to share and optimize limited resources like bandwidth, fiber or optical slots in a flexible and dynamic way. This paper proposes and evaluates the use of Case-Based Reasonin…
Operators perceive programmable networks brought by Software Defined Networks (SDN) as cornerstone to decrease the time to deploy new services, to augment the flexibility and to adapt network resources to customer needs at runtime. However, despite the vulnerabilities identified due that the intelligence is centralized on SDN, its research is more centered on forwarding traffic and reconfiguration issues, not considering to a great extent the fault management aspects of the control plane. This paper provides SDN with fault management capabilities by using autonomic principles like self-healing…
This paper introduces a novel algorithm, the Active Virtual Network Management Protocol (AVNMP), for predictive network management. It explains how the AVNMP facilitates the management of an active network by allowing future predicted state information within an active network to be available to network management algorithms. This is accomplished by coupling ideas from optimistic discrete event simulation with active networking. The optimistic discrete event simulation method used is a form of self-adjusting Time Warp. It is self-adjusting because the system adjusts for predictions which are i…
Traditionally, resource management and capacity allocation has been controlled network-side in cellular deployment. As autonomicity has been added to network design, machine learning technologies have largely followed this paradigm, benefiting from the higher compute capacity and informational context available at the network core. However, when these network services are disaggregated or decentralized, models that rely on assumed levels of network or information availability may no longer function reliably. This paper presents an inverted view of the resource management paradigm; one in which…
A wide range of services and applications can be improved and/or solved by using distributed ledger technology (DLT). These services and applications have widely varying quality of service (QoS) requirements. However, most existing DLT systems do not distinguish different QoS requirements, resulting in significant performance issues such as poor scalability and high cost. In this work, we present vDLT -- a service-oriented blockchain system with virtualization and decoupled management/control and execution. In vDLT, services and applications are classified into different classes according to t…
Efficient virtual machine (VM) management can dramatically reduce energy consumption in data centers. Existing VM management algorithms fall into two categories based on whether the VMs' resource demands are assumed to be static or dynamic. The former category fails to maximize the resource utilization as they cannot adapt to the dynamic nature of VMs' resource demands. Most approaches in the latter category are heuristical and lack theoretical performance guarantees. In this work, we formulate dynamic VM management as a large-scale Markov Decision Process (MDP) problem and derive an optimal s…
The ubiquitous nature of IoT devices has brought new and exciting applications in computing and communication paradigms. Due to its ability to enable auto-configurable communication between IoT devices, pervasive applications, and remote clients, the use of the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) protocol is widespread. However, the advertisement and discovery mechanism of UPnP incurs significant overhead on resource-constrained IoT devices. In this paper, we propose a delegation-based approach that extends the UPnP protocol by offloading the service advertisement and discovery-related overhead fro…
Network Function Virtualization (NFV) carries the potential for on-demand deployment of network algorithms in virtual machines (VMs). In large clouds, however, VM resource allocation incurs delays that hinder the dynamic scaling of such NFV deployment. Parallel resource management is a promising direction for boosting performance, but it may significantly increase the communication overhead and the decline ratio of deployment attempts. Our work analyzes the performance of various placement algorithms and provides empirical evidence that state-of-the-art parallel resource management dramaticall…
Internet of Things (IoT) and Network Softwarization are fast becoming core technologies of information systems and network management for next generation Internet. The deployment and applications of IoT ranges from smart cities to urban computing, and from ubiquitous healthcare to tactile Internet. For this reason the physical infrastructure of heterogeneous network systems has become more complicated, and thus requires efficient and dynamic solutions for management, configuration, and flow scheduling. Network softwarization in the form of Software Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Function V…
Femtocells represent a promising alternative solution for high quality wireless access in indoor scenarios where conventional cellular system coverage can be poor. Femtocell access points (FAP) are normally randomly deployed by the end user, so only post deployment network planning is possible. Furthermore, this uncoordinated deployment creates the potential for severe interference to co-located femtocells, especially in dense deployments. This paper presents a new femtocell network architecture using a generalized virtual cluster femtocell (GVCF) paradigm, which groups together FAP, which are…
In the cloud computing environment, cloud virtual machine (VM) will be more and more the number of virtual machine security and management faced giant Challenge. In order to address security issues cloud computing virtualization environment, this paper presents a virtual machine based on efficient and dynamic deployment VM security management model state migration and scheduling, study of which virtual machine security architecture, based on AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) virtual machine deployment and scheduling method, based on CUSUM (Cumulative Sum) DDoS attack detection algorithm, and th…
Optical communication is developing rapidly in the directions of hardware resource diversification, transmission system flexibility, and network function virtualization. Its proliferation poses a significant challenge to traditional optical communication management and control systems. Digital twin (DT), a technology that utilizes data, models, and algorithms and integrates multiple disciplines, acts as a bridge between the real and virtual worlds for comprehensive connectivity. In the digital space, virtual models are stablished dynamically to simulate and describe the states, behaviors, and …
Network Virtualization is one of the key technologies for developing the future mobile networks. However, the performance of virtual mobile entities may not be sufficient for delivering the service required for future networks in terms of throughput or service time. In addition, to take advantage of the virtualization capabilities, a criterion to decide when to scale out the number of instances is a must. In this paper we propose an LTE virtualized Mobility Management Entity queue model to evaluate its service time for a given signaling workload. The estimation of this latency can serve to dec…
New-generation wireless networks are designed to support a wide range of services with diverse key performance indicators (KPIs) requirements. A fundamental component of such networks, and a pivotal factor to the fulfillment of the target KPIs, is the virtual radio access network (vRAN), which allows high flexibility on the control of the radio link. However, to fully exploit the potentiality of vRANs, an efficient mapping of the rapidly varying context to radio control decisions is not only essential, but also challenging owing to the interdependence of user traffic demand, channel conditions…
The recent FATF Recommendations defines virtual assets and virtual assets service providers (VASP), and requires under the Travel Rule that originating VASPs obtain and hold required and accurate originator information and required beneficiary information on virtual asset transfers. In this paper we discuss the notion of key ownership evidence as a core part of originator and beneficiary information required by the FATF Recommendation. We discuss approaches to securely communicate the originator and beneficiary information between VASPs, and review existing standards for public key certificate…
Datacenters (DCs), deployed in a large scale to support the ever increasing demand for data processing applications, consume tremendous energy. Powering DCs with renewable energy can effectively reduce the brown energy consumption. Owing to geographically distributed deployment of DCs, the renewable energy generation and the data processing demands usually vary in different DCs. Migrating virtual machines (VMs) among DCs according to the availability of renewable energy helps match the energy demands and the renewable energy generation in DCs, and thus maximizes the utilization of renewable en…
Live virtual machine migration aims at enabling the dynamic balanced use of the networking/computing physical resources of virtualized data-centers, so to lead to reduced energy consumption. Here, we analytically characterize, prototype in software and test an optimal bandwidth manager for live migration of VMs in wireless channel. In this paper we present the optimal tunable-complexity bandwidth manager (TCBM) for the QoS live migration of VMs under a wireless channel from smartphone to access point. The goal is the minimization of the migration-induced communication energy under service leve…
Research into active networking has provided the incentive to re-visit what has traditionally been classified as distinct properties and characteristics of information transfer such as protocol versus service; at a more fundamental level this paper considers the blending of computation and communication by means of complexity. The specific service examined in this paper is network self-prediction enabled by Active Virtual Network Management Prediction. Computation/communication is analyzed via Kolmogorov Complexity. The result is a mechanism to understand and improve the performance of active …
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are composed of low powered and resource-constrained wireless sensor nodes that are not capable of performing high-complexity algorithms. Integrating these networks into the Internet of Things (IoT) facilitates their real-time optimization based on remote data visualization and analysis. This work describes the design and implementation of a scalable system architecture that integrates WSNs and cloud services to work autonomously in an IoT environment. The implementation relies on Software Defined Networking features to simplify the WSN management and exploits d…
By integrating Software-Defined Networking and cloud computing, virtualized networking and computing resources can be dynamically reallocated through live migration of Virtual Machines (VMs). Dynamic resource management such as load balancing and energy-saving policies can request multiple migrations when the algorithms are triggered periodically. There exist notable research efforts in dynamic resource management that alleviate single migration overheads, such as single migration time and co-location interference while selecting the potential VMs and migration destinations. However, by neglec…
Cloud computing systems promise to offer subscription-oriented, enterprise-quality computing services to users worldwide. With the increased demand for delivering services to a large number of users, they need to offer differentiated services to users and meet their quality expectations. Existing resource management systems in data centers are yet to support Service Level Agreement (SLA)-oriented resource allocation, and thus need to be enhanced to realize cloud computing and utility computing. In addition, no work has been done to collectively incorporate customer-driven service management, c…
Deployment of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) over multiple clouds accentuates its advantages like the flexibility of virtualization, proximity to customers and lower total cost of operation. However, NFV over multiple clouds has not yet attained the level of performance to be a viable replacement for traditional networks. One of the reasons is the absence of a standard based Fault, Configuration, Accounting, Performance and Security (FCAPS) framework for the virtual network services. In NFV, faults and performance issues can have complex geneses within virtual resources as well as virtu…
Virtual network services that span multiple data centers are important to support emerging data-intensive applications in fields such as bioinformatics and retail analytics. Successful virtual network service composition and maintenance requires flexible and scalable 'constrained shortest path management' both in the management plane for virtual network embedding (VNE) or network function virtualization service chaining (NFV-SC), as well as in the data plane for traffic engineering (TE). In this paper, we show analytically and empirically that leveraging constrained shortest paths within recen…
This article proposes a self-organizing collaborative computing network with an approach to enhance the expectation of a collaborating node for joining the self-organizing network. The proposed approach relies on Ethereum cryptocurrency and Smart Contract to enhance the expectation of collaborating nodes by monetizing the services provided to the self-organizing network. Furthermore, an escrow based smart contract is formalized in the proposed framework to sustains the monetary trust issue between collaborating nodes. The proposed scheme can enforce an autonomic incentive management mechanism …
We propose Roadside Unit (RSU) Clouds as a novel way to offer non-safety application with QoS for VANETs. The architecture of RSU Clouds is delineated, and consists of traditional RSUs and specialized micro-datacenters and virtual machines (VMs) using Software Defined Networking (SDN). SDN offers the flexibility to migrate or replicate virtual services and reconfigure the data forwarding rules dynamically. However, frequent changes to service hosts and data flows not only result in degradation of services, but are also costly for service providers. In this paper, we use Mininet to analyze and …
Allocating resources to virtualized network functions and services to meet service level agreements is a challenging task for NFV management and orchestration systems. This becomes even more challenging when agile development methodologies, like DevOps, are applied. In such scenarios, management and orchestration systems are continuously facing new versions of functions and services which makes it hard to decide how much resources have to be allocated to them to provide the expected service performance. One solution for this problem is to support resource allocation decisions with performance …
Network virtualization is a way to simultaneously run multiple heterogeneous architectures on a shared substrate. The main issue in network virtualization is mapping virtual networks to substrate network. How to manage substrate resources in mapping phase will have an effective role in improving the use of infrastructure resources. Using software-based networks in network virtualization which separates control logic from data as a new technology, has led to efficient resource management in this context. In this article a software-based network approach has been presented to network virtualizat…
In this paper, we propose an architecture for Network of Information mobile node (NetInf MN). It bears characteristics and features of basic NetInf node architecture with features introduced in the LISP MN architecture. We also introduce a virtual node layer for mobility management in the Network of Information. Therefore, by adopting this architecture no major changes in the contemporary network topologies is required. Thus, making our approach more practical.
University of Bristol（布里斯托尔大学）；EURECOM（欧洲通信研究院）；IBM Haifa Research Labs（IBM海法研究实验室）
Fifth Generation (5G) networks are envisioned to be fully autonomous in accordance to the ETSI-defined Zero touch network and Service Management (ZSM) concept. To this end, purpose-specific Machine Learning (ML) models can be used to manage and control physical as well as virtual network resources in a way that is fully compliant to slice Service Level Agreements (SLAs), while also boosting the revenue of the underlying physical network operator(s). This is because specially designed and trained ML models can be both proactive and very effective against slice management issues that can induce …
Chat-Driven Optimal Management for Virtual Network Services
Department of Applied Physics and Physico-Informatics, Keio University（应用物理与物理信息学系，庆应大学）；Network Service Laboratories, NTT, Inc.（网络服务实验室，NTT公司）；IOWN Product Design Center, NTT, Inc.（IOWN产品设计中心，NTT公司）
Network softwarization has revolutionized the architecture of cellular wireless networks. State-of-the-art container based virtual radio access networks (vRAN) provide enormous flexibility and reduced life cycle management costs, but they also come with prohibitive energy consumption. We argue that for future AI-native wireless networks to be flexible and energy efficient, there is a need for a new abstraction in network softwarization that caters for neural network type of workloads and allows a large degree of service composability. In this paper we present the NeuroRAN architecture, which l…
In conventional large-scale networks, creation and management of network services are costly and complex tasks that often consume a lot of resources, including time and manpower. Network softwarization and network function virtualization have been introduced to tackle these problems. They replace the hardware-based network service components and network control mechanisms with software components running on general-purpose hardware, aiming at decreasing costs and complexity of implementing new services, maintaining the implemented services, and managing available resources in service provision…
Management and orchestration (MANO) of resources by virtual network functions (VNFs) represents one of the key challenges towards a fully virtualized network architecture as envisaged by 5G standards. Current threshold-based policies inefficiently over-provision network resources and under-utilize available hardware, incurring high cost for network operators, and consequently, the users. In this work, we present a MANO algorithm for VNFs allowing a central unit (CU) to learn to autonomously re-configure resources (processing power and storage), deploy new VNF instances, or offload them to the …
In the era of Internet of Things, all components in intelligent transportation systems will be connected to improve transport safety, relieve traffic congestion, reduce air pollution and enhance the comfort of driving. The vision of all vehicles connected poses a significant challenge to the collection and storage of large amounts of traffic-related data. In this article, we propose to integrate cloud computing into vehicular networks such that the vehicles can share computation resources, storage resources and bandwidth resources. The proposed architecture includes a vehicular cloud, a roadsi…
Network slicing is a crucial part of the 5G networks that communication service providers (CSPs) seek to deploy. By exploiting three main enabling technologies, namely, software-defined networking (SDN), network function virtualization (NFV), and network slicing, communication services can be served to the end-users in an efficient, scalable, and flexible manner. To adopt these technologies, what is highly important is how to allocate the resources and admit the customers of the CSPs based on the predefined criteria and available resources. In this regard, we propose a novel joint resource and…
China University of Petroleum (East China)（中国石油大学（华东））；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology（萨帕尔工程技术学院）
The development of Intelligent Cyber-Physical Systems (ICPSs) in virtual network environment is facing severe challenges. On the one hand, the Internet of things (IoT) based on ICPSs construction needs a large amount of reasonable network resources support. On the other hand, ICPSs are facing severe network security problems. The integration of ICPSs and network virtualization (NV) can provide more efficient network resource support and security guarantees for IoT users. Based on the above two problems faced by ICPSs, we propose a virtual network embedded (VNE) algorithm with computing, storag…
Network operators are facing significant challenges meeting the demand for more bandwidth, agile infrastructures, innovative services, while keeping costs low. Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Cloud Computing are emerging as key trends of 5G network architectures, providing flexibility, fast instantiation times, support of Commercial Off The Shelf hardware and significant cost savings. NFV leverages Cloud Computing principles to move the data-plane network functions from expensive, closed and proprietary hardware to the so-called Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). In this paper we dea…
