Dynamic network service deployment across multiple SDN domains

The discovery process of OPC Unified Architecture (OPC-UA) is well defined but lacks flexibility when implemented in large networks. While the standard provides concepts for local and global discovery services, the core assumption is that all clients and servers are aware of the discovery server(s) in the network. This dependency is a barrier for Plug-and-Play installations and is overcome by self announces via the multicast Domain Name System (mDNS), however, this scales badly with an increasing number of network nodes and deployed servers. We propose a discovery approach based on Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV), that installs a plug-and-play mechanism for global OPC-UA discovery in modern virtualized networks.

Network functions virtualization (NFV) technology is an emerging networking technology in the telecom industry which provides flexible deployment of network services by reducing the Operating Expenses and Capital Expenses. NFV is an innovative step to virtualize network services that usually run on fixed hardware. With the concept of NFV, services like routing, load balancing, deep packet inspectors and firewalls are packaged as virtual network functions (VNFs) on commodity hardware. NFV helps the service provider to flexibly add that service in the form of a virtual machine (VMs) without upgrading or buying a new hardware on the customer end. This allows a faster deployment of the all the network services with new innovations and helps in increasing great opportunities in the field of telecom-networking. This paper provides an information about NFV technology with its characteristics, enabling technologies, benefits, use cases and challenges. NFV architecture and its comparison with Software Defined Networking (SDN) technology is also presented in this survey paper.

Metropolitan networks are undergoing a major technological breakthrough leveraging the capabilities of software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV). NFV permits the deployment of virtualized network functions (VNFs) on commodity hardware appliances which can be combined with SDN flexibility and programmability of the network infrastructure. SDN/NFV-enabled networks require decision-making in two time scales: short-term online resource allocation and mid-to-long term offline planning. In this paper, we first tackle the dimensioning of SDN/NFV-enabled metropolitan networks paying special attention to the role that latency plays in the capacity planning. We focus on a specific use-case: the metropolitan network that covers the Murcia - Alicante Spanish regions. Then, we propose a latency-aware multilayer service-chain allocation (LA-ML-SCA) algorithm to explore a range of maximum latency requirements and their impact on the resources for dimensioning the metropolitan network. We observe that design costs increase for low latency requirements as more data center facilities need to be spread to get closer to the network edge, reducing the economies of scale on the IT infrastructure. Subsequently, we review our recent joint computation of multi-site VNF placement and multilayer resource allocation in the deployment of a network service in a metro network. Specifically, a set of subroutines contained in LA-ML-SCA are experimentally validated in a network optimization-as-a-service architecture that assists an Open-Source MANO instance, virtual infrastructure managers and WAN controllers in a metro network test-bed.

Attack-aware Security Function Management

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 2018 ACM International Workshop on Security in Software Defined Networks & Network Function Virtualization - SDN-NFV Security'18. SDN-NFV Security'18 offers a unique opportunity by bringing together researchers from academic, industry, as well as government agencies to discuss security challenges faced by two emerging networking paradigms, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). SDN-NFV Security'18 solicits the submission of original unpublished ideas in 6-page long papers and 4-page short papers that address the latest practices, experiences, and lessons learned on SDN and NFV security. The call for papers attracted submissions from Europe and the United States. SDN-NFV Security'18 accepted 3 full papers be presented in this workshop, after a rigorous review process (at least 4 reviews for each paper) and discussion phase. In addition, we have invited 8 papers (5 full papers and 3 short papers) from domain experts to be presented in the workshop.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) are transforming Data Center (DC), Telecom, and enterprise networking. The programmability offered by P4 enables SDN to be more protocol-independent and flexible. Data Centers are increasingly adopting SmartNICs (sNICs) to accelerate packet processing that can be leveraged to support packet processing pipelines and custom Network Functions (NFs). However, there are several challenges in integrating and deploying P4 based SDN control as well as host and sNIC-based programmable NFs. These include configuration and management of the data plane components (Host and sNIC P4 switches) for the SDN control plane and effective utilization of data plane resources. P4NFV addresses these concerns and provides a unified P4 switch abstraction framework to simplify the SDN control plane, reducing management complexities, and leveraging a host-local SDN Agent to improve the overall resource utilization. The SDN agent considers the network-wide, host, and sNIC specific capabilities and constraints. Based on workload and traffic characteristics, P4NFV determines the partitioning of the P4 tables and optimal placement of NFs (P4 actions) to minimize the overall delay and maximize resource utilization. P4NFV uses Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) based optimization formulation and achieves up to 2. 5X increase in system capacity while minimizing the delay experienced by flows. P4NFV considers the number of packet exchanges, flow size, and state dependency to minimize the delay imposed by data transmission over PCI Express interface.

In this era wireless technology gaining more popularity, people prefer wireless communication over wired communication due to mobility, scalability and ease of access. However, the traditional wireless network is complex, vendor dependent and inadequate feasibility to incorporate new services, protocols, and APIs. The rapid growth in wireless network raises many thoughtful challenges for network and telecom operators. On such grounds, Innovation of Software Defined Network (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) for mobile network opens a new arena of research. This research article presents future mobile Internet architecture (FMIA) with the integration of twin technologies, SDN and NFV that enable rapid access to Internet services. Moreover, the network manager can control services provided by ISPs through proposed architecture.

The design, management, and operation of network infrastructure have evolved during the last few years, leveraging on innovative technologies and architectures. With such a huge trend, due to the flexibility and significant economic potential of these technologies, software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) are emerging as the most indispensable key catalysers. SDN/NFV enhancing the infrastructure agility, thus network operators and service providers are able to program their own network functions (e.g., gateways, routers, load balancers) on vendor-independent hardware substrate. One of the most important considerations in NFV deployment is how to allocate the virtual resources that are needed to provide flexible virtual network services in an NFV-based network infrastructure. Thus, the most important prerequisite for NFV deployment is achieved fast, scalable and dynamic composition and allocation of networks functions (NFs) to implement network services (NSs). We have proposed a revised RA algorithm that integrates embedding and scheduling of virtual network functions (VNFs) simultaneously. In this paper, performance evaluation of the revised RA algorithm is performed and the proposed algorithm is applied more effectively in NFV environment where the demand for resources is flexible and concentrated.

Software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) together form a promising paradigm that enables the slicing of heterogeneous network resources for agile and efficient service customization. Among other techniques, virtual network function (VNF) mapping and scheduling are crucial to the deployment of SDN/NFV-enabled network services. In this paper, to enhance the performance of service provisioning, dynamic VNF mapping and scheduling are jointly investigated. Specifically, to achieve load balancing with QoS guarantee, we first formulate the VNF mapping and scheduling problem as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP). We then propose a two-stage online algorithm to address the NP-hardness of the MILP. In particular, when new service arrives, we map and schedule the VNFs on a service function chain (SFC) by greedily minimizing the waiting time of VNFs. If the delay requirement cannot be satisfied after the first stage, a delay-aware rescheduling scheme is triggered, in which selected existing VNFs are remapped and rescheduled. The proposed dynamic approach achieves flexible function placement and increases service acceptance ratio. Simulation results are provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

The deployment of network services and functions in Network Function Virtualization (NFV) platforms is performed using deployment descriptors. The deployment descriptors describe the topology of the network service and the operation behavior of the network functions along with their resource requirements. They are huge file written manually by service providers devoid of any formal strategy besides experience. Designing those descriptors from scratch is undoubtedly a tedious and complex task given the dynamicity at which the NFV is constantly evolving. Additionally, relying solely on the service provider knowledge is not only error-prone, but also challengeable. Motivated by the design by reuse paradigm, we present in this paper a configurable descriptor model that allows to formalize best practices in designing descriptor models for a specific domain. A configurable descriptor model can be seen as a generic solution that needs to be configured by a service provider to suit the specific requirements of a deployed service. In this way, configurable descriptor models can ease and accelerate the modeling of deployment descriptors by providing an off-the-shelf-solution that can be easily configured in a “plug and play” fashion. Our prototypical implementation demonstrates the feasibility of our approach and the results of our experiments highlight the effectiveness of our proposed model.

As a new way to design, deploy and manage networkservices, network functions virtualization (NFV) decouplesthe network functions, from one or more physical networkinfrastructures and black boxes so they can run in software.It therefore comes as no surprise that NFV originated fromservice providers, who were looking to improve the deploymentof new network services to support their revenue and growthobjectives. Within the NFV ecosystem, high availability and lowlatency are one of the key QoS benefits that service providerscan expect from the 5G Cloud and the NFV networks to makedelay-critical services such as remote surgery a reality. Therefore,network services should be placed, chained and routed throughthe network considering users/tenants stringent quality of service(QoS) and service-level agreement (SLA) requirements. To thisend, routing and placement optimization plays a major rolein improving network performance and the overall networkcost. In this paper, we study the problem of virtual networkfunctions (VNFs) placement and routing across the physical hoststo minimize overall latency defined as the queuing delay withinthe edge clouds and in network links. In that respect, this worktakes a holistic view by considering not only VNFs chaining andplacement problem but also considering the flows routing aspectsince these two problems are inter-related and have a majorimpact on network latency.

The recent trends in software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) are boosting the advance of software-based packet processing and forwarding on commodity servers. Although performance has traditionally been the challenge of this approach, this situation changes with modern server platforms. High performance load balancers, proxies, virtual switches and other network functions can be now implemented in software and not limited to specialized commercial hardware, thus reducing cost and increasing the flexibility. In this paper we design a lossless software-based switch for high bandwidth data acquisition (DAQ) networks, using the ATLAS experiment at CERN as a case study. We prove that it can effectively solve the incast pathology arising from the many-to-one communication pattern present in DAQ networks by providing extremely high buffering capabilities. We evaluate this on a commodity server equipped with twelve 10 Gbps Ethernet interfaces providing a total bandwidth of 120 Gbps.

Software Defined Network (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) are attracting the attention of telecom operators. The telecom environment requires a set of Carrier Grade requirements such as high availability, high throughput and low latency. SDN faces challenges to meet the Carrier Grade. Based on the JAIN SLEE component model and the Libfluid OpenFlow driver, this work proposes the CREDENCE SDN controller. Our evaluation shows that CREDENCE controller offers a higher throughput and a lower latency when is compared to ONOS and OpenDayLight.

SDN-based service function chaining mechanism and service prototype implementation in NFV scenario

The integration of software-defined networking (S-DN) and network function virtualization (NFV) is expected to achieve the convenient management and flexible deployment of various sophisticated network functions, and support user applications with guaranteed quality of service (QoS). In this paper, we jointly study route selection and network function placement problem. To stress the service sensitivity on delay, we formulate an optimization problem which minimizes the total end-to-end delay subject to data transmission, service requirement and various available resource constraints. As the formulated problem is an NP-hard problem, which cannot be solved easily, we transform it into three subproblems, i.e., route selection subproblem, network function placement subproblem and resource sharing subproblem of user flows, and solve the three subproblems by applying the K-shortest paths algorithm, Kuhn-Munkres (K-M) algorithm and Lagrangian dual method, respectively. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.