We explore the opportunities and design options enabled by novel SDN and NFV technologies, by re-designing a dynamic Content Delivery Network (CDN) service. Our system, named MOSTO, provides performance levels comparable to that of a regular CDN, but does not require the deployment of a large distributed infrastructure. In the process of designing the system, we identify relevant functions that could be integrated in the future Internet infrastructure. Such functions greatly simplify the design and effectiveness of services such as MOSTO. We demonstrate our system using a mixture of simulation, emulation, testbed experiments and by realizing a proof-of-concept deployment in a planet-wide commercial cloud system.
Concordia University（康科迪亚大学）；Université du Québec À Montréal（蒙特利尔魁北克大学）
Traditional Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) built with traditional Internet technology are less and less able to cope with today's tremendous growth of content. Information Centric Networks (ICN), a proposed future Internet technology, may aid in remedying the situation. Unlike the current Internet, it decouples information from its sources and provides in-network storage. We expect traditional CDN and ICN-based CDN to co-exist in the foreseeable future, especially as it is now known that it might be possible to evolve traditional CDNs to gain the benefits promised by ICN. 5G providers must t…
This paper presents a system called NetKernel that decouples the network stack from the guest virtual machine and offers it as an independent module. NetKernel represents a new paradigm where network stack can be managed as part of the virtualized infrastructure. It provides important efficiency benefits: By gaining control and visibility of the network stack, operator can perform network management more directly and flexibly, such as multiplexing VMs running different applications to the same network stack module to save CPU cores, and enforcing fair bandwidth sharing with distributed congest…
VINEVI: A Virtualized Network Vision Architecture for Smart Monitoring of Heterogeneous Applications and Infrastructures
Institute of Exact and Technological Sciences (IEP), Federal University of Viçosa（维索萨联邦大学精确与技术科学研究所）；Faculty of Computing (FACOM), Federal University of Uberlândia（Uberlândia联邦大学计算学院）
With the recent advances in sensor hardware and software, architectures for virtualized Wireless Sensor Networks (vWSNs) are now emerging. Through node- and network-level virtualization, vWSNs can be offered as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) which can aid in realizing the true potential of Internet-of-Things (IoT). Cloud computing offers elastic provisioning of large-scale infrastructures to multiple concurrent users where Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) interacts with IaaS in order to efficiently host and execute applications over these infrastructures. Amalgamating IoT with cloud computing …
Virtualization enables multiple applications to share the same wireless sensor and actuator network (WSAN). However, in heterogeneous environments, virtualized wireless sensor and actuator networks (VWSAN) raise new challenges, such as the need for on-the-fly, dynamic, elastic, and scalable provisioning of gateways. Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is a paradigm emerging to help tackle these new challenges. It leverages standard virtualization technology to consolidate special-purpose network elements on commodity hardware. This article presents NFV architecture for VWSAN gateways, in wh…
The notions of softwarization and virtualization of the radio access network (RAN) of next-generation (5G) wireless systems are ushering in a vision where applications and services are physically decoupled from devices and network infrastructure. This crucial aspect will ultimately enable the dynamic deployment of heterogeneous services by different network operators over the same physical infrastructure. RAN slicing is a form of 5G virtualization that allows network infrastructure owners to dynamically "slice" and "serve" their network resources (i.e., spectrum, power, antennas, among others)…
Malicious co-residency in virtualized networks poses a real threat. The next-generation mobile networks heavily rely on virtualized infrastructure, and network slicing has emerged as a key enabler to support different virtualized services and applications in the 5G network. However, allocating network slices efficiently while providing a minimum guaranteed level of service as well as providing defense against the threat of malicious co-residency in a mobile core is challenging. To address this question, in our previous work, we proposed an optimization model to allocate slices. In this work, w…
IoT and edge computing are profoundly changing the information era, bringing a hyper-connected and context-aware computing environment to reality. Connected vehicles are a critical outcome of this synergy, allowing for the seamless interconnection of autonomous mobile/fixed objects, giving rise to a decentralized vehicle-to-everything (V2X) paradigm. On this front, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) proposed the Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) standard, addressing the execution of cloud-like services at the very edge of the infrastructure, thus facilitating the suppor…
In a virtualized infrastructure where physical resources are shared, a single physical server failure will terminate several virtual servers and crippling the virtual infrastructures which contained those virtual servers. In the worst case, more failures may cascade from overloading the remaining servers. To guarantee some level of reliability, each virtual infrastructure, at instantiation, should be augmented with backup virtual nodes and links that have sufficient capacities. This ensures that, when physical failures occur, sufficient computing resources are available and the virtual network…
The fifth-generation mobile evolution enables transformations on Next-Generation Radio Access Networks (NG-RAN). The RAN protocol stack is split into eight disaggregated options combined in three network units, i.e., Central, Distributed, and Radio. Besides that, further advances allow the RAN functions to be virtualized on top of general-purpose hardware, using the concept of virtualized RAN (vRAN). The Combination of NG-RAN and vRAN results in vNG-RAN, which enables the management of the disaggregated units and protocols as a set of radio functions. However, the orchestration-based placement…
The increasing demand for diverse, mobile applications with various degrees of Quality of Service requirements meets the increasing elasticity of on-demand resource provisioning in virtualized cloud computing infrastructures. This paper provides a dynamic optimization approach for enhanced cloud infrastructures, based on the concept of cloudlets, which are located at hotspot areas throughout a metropolitan area. In conjunction, we consider classical remote data centers that are rigid with respect to QoS but provide nearly abundant computation resources. Given fluctuating user demands, we optim…
Network virtualization and softwarizing network functions are trends aiming at higher network efficiency, cost reduction and agility. They are driven by the evolution in Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). This shows that software will play an increasingly important role within telecommunication services, which were previously dominated by hardware appliances. Service providers can benefit from this, as it enables faster introduction of new telecom services, combined with an agile set of possibilities to optimize and fine-tune their operations. However,…
Application Service Providers (ASPs) obtaining resources from multiple clouds have to contend with different management and control platforms employed by the cloud service providers (CSPs) and network service providers (NSP). Distributing applications on multiple clouds has a number of benefits but the absence of a common multi-cloud management platform that would allow ASPs dynamic and real-time control over resources across multiple clouds and interconnecting networks makes this task arduous. OpenADN, being developed at Washington University in Saint Louis, fills this gap. However, performan…
Opportunistic mobile networks consisting of intermittently connected mobile devices have been exploited for various applications, such as computational offloading and mitigating cellular traffic load. In contrast to existing work, in this paper, we focus on cooperatively offloading data among mobile devices to maximally improve the probability of data delivery from a mobile device to intermittently connected infrastructure within a given time constraint, which is referred to as the \textit{cooperative offloading} problem. Unfortunately, the estimation of data delivery probability over an oppor…
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…
Due to the huge surge in the traffic of IoT devices and applications, mobile networks require a new paradigm shift to handle such demand roll out. With the 5G economics, those networks should provide virtualized multi-vendor and intelligent systems that can scale and efficiently optimize the investment of the underlying infrastructure. Therefore, the market stakeholders have proposed the Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) as one of the solutions to improve the network performance, agility, and time-to-market of new applications. O-RAN harnesses the power of artificial intelligence, cloud comput…
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 …
The virtualization of compute and network resources enables an unseen flexibility for deploying network services. A wide spectrum of emerging technologies allows an ever-growing range of orchestration possibilities in cloud-based environments. But in this context it remains challenging to rhyme dynamic cloud configurations with deterministic performance. The service operator must somehow map the performance specification in the Service Level Agreement (SLA) to an adequate resource allocation in the virtualized infrastructure. We propose the use of a VNF profile to alleviate this process. This …
Major wireless operators are nowadays facing network capacity issues in striving to meet the growing demands of mobile users. At the same time, 3G-enabled devices increasingly benefit from ad hoc radio connectivity (e.g., Wi-Fi). In this context of hybrid connectivity, we propose Push-and-track, a content dissemination framework that harnesses ad hoc communication opportunities to minimize the load on the wireless infrastructure while guaranteeing tight delivery delays. It achieves this through a control loop that collects user-sent acknowledgements to determine if new copies need to be reinje…
computers into the real world, to serve humans where the ubiquitous network is the underneath infrastructure. In order to provide ubiquitous services (u-Service) which deliver useful information to service users without human intervention, this paper implements a proactive information delivery system using Bluetooth technology. Bluetooth is a lowpowered networking service that supports several protocol profiles, most importantly file transfer.Combined together, ubiquitous computing and Bluetooth ha e the potential to furnish ubiquitous solutions (u-Solutions) that are efficient, employ simplif…
To fully empower sensor networks with cognitive Internet of Things (IoT) technology, efficient medium access control protocols that enable the coexistence of cognitive sensor networks with current wireless infrastructure are as essential as the cognitive power in data fusion and processing due to shared wireless spectrum. Cognitive radio (CR) is introduced to increase spectrum efficiency and support such an endeavor, which thereby becomes a promising building block toward facilitating cognitive IoT. In this paper, primary users (PUs) refer to devices in existing wireless infrastructure, and se…
Network Virtualization is one of the most promising technologies for future networking and considered as a critical IT resource that connects distributed, virtualized Cloud Computing services and different components such as storage, servers and application. Network Virtualization allows multiple virtual networks to coexist on same shared physical infrastructure simultaneously. One of the crucial keys in Network Virtualization is Virtual Network Embedding, which provides a method to allocate physical substrate resources to virtual network requests. In this paper, we investigate Virtual Network…
We consider a scheme for offloading the delivery of contents to mobile devices in a vehicular networking scenario. Each content can be delivered to the requesting device either by a neighboring device or, at the expiration of a maximum delay, by the network infrastructure nodes. We compute the analytical expression of the probability that the content delivery is offloaded through a Device-to-Device (D2D) communication as a function of the maximum transmission range allowed for D2D communications, the content popularity, and the vehicles speed. We show that, using the model, it is possible to i…
With the increasing interest in connected vehicles, it is useful to evaluate the capability of delivering large content over a WiFi infrastructure to vehicles. The throughput achieved over WiFi channels can be highly variable and also rapidly degrades as the distance from the access point increases. While this behavior is well understood at the data link layer, the interactions across the various protocol layers (data link and up through the transport layer) and the effect of mobility may reduce the amount of content transferred to the vehicle, as it travels along the roadway. This paper exami…
Most non-safety applications deployed in Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) use vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) and I2V communications to receive various forms of content such as periodic traffic updates, advertisements from adjacent road-side units (RSUs). In case of heavy traffic on highways and urban areas, content delivery time (CDT) can be significantly affected. Increase in CDT can be attributed to high load on the RSU or high volume of broadcasted content which can flood the network. Therefore, this paper suggests a novel caching strategy to improve CDT in high traffic areas and three maj…
The Network Function Virtualization (NFV) paradigm has been devised as an enabler of next generation network infrastructures by speeding up the provisioning and the composition of novel network services. The latter are implemented via a chain of virtualized network functions, a process known as Service Function Chaining. In this paper, we evaluate the availability of multi-tenant SFC infrastructures, where every network function is modeled as a multi-state system and is shared among different and independent tenants. To this aim, we propose a Universal Generating Function (UGF) approach, suita…
Managing cloud services is a fundamental challenge in todays virtualized environments. These challenges equally face both providers and consumers of cloud services. The issue becomes even more challenging in virtualized environments that support mobile clouds. Cloud computing platforms such as Amazon EC2 provide customers with flexible, on demand resources at low cost. However, they fail to provide seamless infrastructure management and monitoring capabilities that many customers may need. For instance, Amazon EC2 doesn't fully support cloud services automated discovery and it requires a priva…
Major wireless operators are nowadays facing network capacity issues in striving to meet the growing demands of mobile users. At the same time, 3G-enabled devices increasingly benefit from ad hoc radio connectivity (e.g., Wi-Fi). In this context of hybrid connectivity, we propose Push-and-track, a content dissemina- tion framework that harnesses ad hoc communication opportunities to minimize the load on the wireless infrastructure while guaranteeing tight delivery delays. It achieves this through a control loop that collects user-sent acknowledgements to determine if new copies need to be rein…
5G has a main requirement of highly flexible, ultralow latency and ultra-high bandwidth virtualized infrastructure in order to deliver end-to-end services. This requirement can be met by efficiently integrating all network segments (radio access, aggregation and core) with heterogeneous wireless and optical technologies (5G, mmWave, LTE/LTE-A, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, MPLS, WDM, software-defined optical transmission, etc.), and massive computing and storage cloud services (offered in edge/core data centers). This paper introduces the preliminary architecture aiming at integrating three consolidated an…
Optimal placement of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) in virtualized data centers enhances the overall performance of Service Function Chains (SFCs) and decreases the operational costs for mobile network operators. Maintaining an optimal placement of VNFs under changing load requires a dynamic reconfiguration that includes adding or removing VNF instances, changing the resource allocation of VNFs, and re-routing corresponding service flows. However, such reconfiguration may lead to notable service disruptions and impose additional overhead on the VNF infrastructure, especially when reconfigura…
NeuroScaler: Towards Energy-Optimal Autoscaling for Container-Based Services
Federal University of Uberlândia (UFU)（乌贝兰迪亚联邦大学）；Instituto de Telecomunicações (ITAV)（电信研究所）；Federal University of Viçosa (UFV)（维索萨联邦大学）；OmniumAI；University of Minho (UMinho)（米尼奥大学）
The growth of video streaming has stretched the Internet to its limitation. In other words, the Internet was originally devised to connect a limited number of computers so that they can share network resources, so the Internet cannot handle a large amount of traffic at a time, which leads to network congestion. To overcome this, CDNs are built on top of the Internet as an overlay to efficiently store and swiftly disseminate contents to users by placing many servers and data centers around the globe. The topic of CDNs has been extensively studied in the last several decades. However, there is s…
Value-added Services (VASs) (e.g. dynamic site acceleration, media management) play a critical role in Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) enables the agile provisioning of VASs. In NFV settings, VASs are provisioned as ordered sets of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs), forming VNF-Forwarding Graphs (VNF-FG) which are deployed in the CDN infrastructure. The CDN VAS VNF-FGs have a specific characteristic: they have one end-point (corresponding to the content server) that is unknown, prior to their placement. The proposals for CDN VAS VNF-FG placement, so far,…
This paper presents the design and development of a networking laboratory that integrates physical networking equipment with the open source GNS3 network simulators for delivery of practical networking classes simultaneously to both on-campus and online students. This transformation work has resulted in significant increase in laboratory capacity, reducing repeating classes. The integrated platform offers students the real world experience of using real equipment, and the convenience of easy setup and reconfiguration by using simulators. A practical exercise in setting up an OSPF/BGP network i…
The ongoing research and industrial exploitation of SDN and NFV technologies promise higher flexibility on network automation and infrastructure optimization. Choosing the location of Virtual Network Functions is a central problem in the automation and optimization of the software-defined, virtualization-based next generation of networks such as 5G and beyond. Network services provided for autonomous vehicles, factory automation, e-health and cloud robotics often require strict delay bounds and reliability constraints, which are influenced by the location of its composing Virtual Network Funct…
The growing online traffic that is bringing the infrastructure to its limits induces an urgent demand for an efficient content delivery model. Capitalizing social networks and using advanced delivery networks potentially can help to solve this problem. However, due to the complex nature of the involved networks such a model is difficult to assess. In this paper we use a simulative approach to analyze how the SatTorrent P2P protocol supported by social networks can improve content delivery by means of reduced download duration and traffic.
Network Functions Virtualization, or NFV, enables telecommunications infrastructure providers to replace special-purpose networking equipment with commodity servers running virtualized network functions (VNFs). A service provider utilizing NFV technology faces the SFC provisioning problem of assigning VNF instances to nodes in the physical infrastructure (e.g., a datacenter), and routing Service Function Chains (sequences of functions required by customers, a.k.a. SFCs) in the physical network. In doing so, the provider must balance between various competing goals of performance and resource u…
We propose behavior-oriented services as a new paradigm of communication in mobile human networks. Our study is motivated by the tight user-network coupling in future mobile societies. In such a paradigm, messages are sent to inferred behavioral profiles, instead of explicit IDs. Our paper provides a systematic framework in providing such services. First, user behavioral profiles are constructed based on traces collected from two large wireless networks, and their spatio-temporal stability is analyzed. The implicit relationship discovered between mobile users could be utilized to provide a ser…
Network Function Virtualization (NFV) shed new light for the design, deployment, and management of cloud networks. Many network functions such as firewalls, load balancers, and intrusion detection systems can be virtualized by servers. However, network operators often have to sacrifice programmability in order to achieve high throughput, especially at networks' edge where complex network functions are required. Here, we design, implement, and evaluate Hybrid Modular Switch (HyMoS). The hybrid hardware/software switch is designed to meet requirements for modern-day NFV applications in providing…
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a dynamic and complex service system. It causes a huge amount of traffic on the network infrastructure of Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Oftentimes, CDN providers and ISPs struggle to find an efficient and appropriate way to cooperate for mutual benefits. This challenge is key to push the quality of service (QoS) for the end-user. We model, simulate, and optimize the behavior of a CDN to provide cooperative solutions and to improve the QoS. Therefor, we determine reasonable server locations, balance the amount of servers and improve the user assignments …
For a provider of a Content Delivery Network (CDN), the location selection of mirror servers is a complex optimization problem. Generally, the objective is to place the nodes centralized such that all customers have convenient access to the service according to their demands. It is an instance of the k-center problem, which is proven to be NP-hard. Determining reasonable server locations directly influences run time effects and future service costs. We model, simulate, and optimize the properties of a content delivery network. Specifically, considering the server locations in a network infrast…
Future communication networks such as 5G are expected to support end-to-end delivery of services for several vertical markets with diverging requirements. Network slicing is a key construct that is used to provide end to end logical virtual networks running on a common virtualised infrastructure, which are mutually isolated. Having different network slices operating over the same 5G infrastructure creates several challenges in security and trust. This paper addresses the fundamental issue of trust of a network slice. It presents a trust model and property-based trust attestation mechanisms whi…
Current network access infrastructures are characterized by heterogeneity, low latency, high throughput, and high computational capability, enabling massive concurrent connections and various services. Unfortunately, this design does not pay significant attention to mobile services in underserved areas. In this context, the use of aerial radio access networks (ARANs) is a promising strategy to complement existing terrestrial communication systems. Involving airborne components such as unmanned aerial vehicles, drones, and satellites, ARANs can quickly establish a flexible access infrastructure…
Internet-scale distributed systems such as content delivery networks (CDNs) operate hundreds of thousands of servers deployed in thousands of data center locations around the globe. Since the energy costs of operating such a large IT infrastructure are a significant fraction of the total operating costs, we argue for redesigning CDNs to incorporate energy optimizations as a first-order principle. We propose techniques to turn off CDN servers during periods of low load while seeking to balance three key design goals: maximize energy reduction, minimize the impact on client-perceived service ava…
Video content delivery over wireless networks is expected to grow drastically in the coming years. In this paper, we investigate the challenging problem of video over cognitive radio (CR) networks. Although having high potential, this problem brings about a new level of technical challenges. After reviewing related work, we first address the problem of video over infrastructure-based CR networks, and then extend the problem to video over non-infrastructure-based ad hoc CR networks. We present formulations of cross-layer optimization problems as well as effective algorithms to solving the probl…
