Proposal of Virtual Network Configuration Acquisition Function for Data Center Operations and Management System

Recently, technology of cloud computing has been rapidly developed, and it is expected to apply for various network services. Virtual technology is a part of significant technology which has been contributed for the development of cloud computing. Various virtual technologies such as virtual OS and VDE become very important for server and network management in these days. Furthermore, such a virtual technology becomes possible to provide efficient resource management or QoS with virtual network configuration. Thus, it will be important for network construction to provide hardware and software service in near future. Autonomous network configuration in virtual layer is one of such a service. Not only network configuration is constructed in physical layer, but also it should be constructed in virtual layer for providing optimal resource and QoS management. In this paper, Overlay Cloud Computing Service is proposed, and it is consisted of virtual autonomous network configuration in cloud computing service including various server and network services. In our proposal methods, first of all, there are various kinds of user policy such as eco mode, high power mode, and secure mode. Then, virtual network and server configuration is automatically held in virtual layer with the mode setting and hardware configuration. Besides, with observation values of network and server condition, virtual configuration is changed optimally. In this optimal configuration changes, Kalman filter is used for the calculation of network and server condition. Then, with the results of calculation, virtual network topology is changed. In this paper, first, introduction and cloud computing service is discussed. Then, our proposed Overlay Cloud Computing Service by autonomous network configuration is introduced. In the chapter, optimal control method by Kalman filter with observed values is also introduced. Finally, conclusion and future study is discussed.

CoMap: An efficient virtual network re-mapping strategy based on coalitional matching theory

Edge-assisted Internet of things applications often need to use cloud virtual network services to transmit data. However, the internal threats such as illegal management and configuration to cloud platform intentionally or unintentionally will lead to virtual network security problems such as malicious changes of user network and hijacked data flow. It will eventually affect edge-assisted Internet of things applications. We propose a virtual network internal threat detection method called VNGuarder in a cloud computing environment, which can effectively monitor whether the virtual network configuration of legitimate users under the IaaS cloud platform has been maliciously changed or destroyed by insiders. First, based on the life cycle of cloud virtual network services, we summarized two types of internal attacks involving illegal use of virtualization management tools and illegal invocation of virtual network-related processes. Second, based on normal behavior of tenants, a hierarchical trusted call correlation scheme is proposed to provide a basis for discovering that insiders illegally call virtualized management tools and virtual network-related processes on the controller node of the cloud platform or the network node and compute node. Third, a trace-enable mechanism combining real-time monitoring and log analysis is introduced. By collecting and recording the complete call process of virtual network management and configuration in the cloud platform, and comparing it with the result of the hierarchical trusted call correlation, abnormal operations can be reported to the tenants in time. Comprehensive simulation experiments on the Openstack platform show that VNGuarder can effectively detect illegal management and configuration of virtual networks by insiders without significantly affecting the creation time of tenant networks and the utilization of CPU and memory.

Optical networks are crucial to support increasingly demanding cloud services. Delivering the requested quality of services (in particular latency) is key to successfully provisioning end-to-end services in clouds. Therefore, as for traditional optical network services, it is of utter importance to guarantee that clouds are resilient to any failure of either network infrastructure (links and/or nodes) or data centers. A crucial concept in establishing cloud services is that of network virtualization: the physical infrastructure is logically partitioned in separate virtual networks. To guarantee end-to-end resilience for cloud services in such a set-up, we need to simultaneously route the services and map the virtual network, in such a way that an alternate routing in case of physical resource failures is always available. Note that combined control of the network and data center resources is exploited, and the anycast routing concept applies: we can choose the data center to provide server resources requested by the customer to optimize resource usage and/or resiliency. This paper investigates the design of scalable optimization models to perform the virtual network mapping resiliently. We compare various resilience options, and analyze their compromise between bandwidth requirements and resiliency quality.

Data centers (DCs), owing to the exponential growth of Internet services, have emerged as an irreplaceable and crucial infrastructure to power this ever-growing trend. A DC typically houses a large number of computing and storage nodes, interconnected by a specially designed network, namely, DC network (DCN). The DCN serves as a communication backbone and plays a pivotal role in optimizing DC operations. However, compared to the traditional network, the unique requirements in the DCN, for example, large scale, vast application diversity, high power density, and high reliability, pose significant challenges to its infrastructure and operations. We have observed from the premium publication venues (e.g., journals and system conferences) that increasing research efforts are being devoted to optimize the design and operations of the DCN. In this paper, we aim to present a systematic taxonomy and survey of recent research efforts on the DCN. Specifically, we propose to classify these research efforts into two areas: 1) DCN infrastructure and 2) DCN operations. For the former aspect, we review and compare the list of transmission technologies and network topologies used or proposed in the DCN infrastructure. For the latter aspect, we summarize the existing traffic control techniques in the DCN operations, and survey optimization methods to achieve diverse operational objectives, including high network utilization, fair bandwidth sharing, low service latency, low energy consumption, high resiliency, and etc., for efficient DC operations. We finally conclude this survey by envisioning a few open research opportunities in DCN infrastructure and operations.

With ubiquitous presence and perpetual growth of software applications and computing devices connected to the Internet, organizations and businesses are faced with increasing challenges in operating and maintaining technologies that support their IT infrastructure. Among the goals of technology management are cost-effectiveness, energy efficiency, and secure management of information technologies, which are expected to produce maximum utility value. Virtualization has been proposed as a promising solution to the challenges facing today's IT managers. From virtualized servers to virtualized networks to virtual data centers, various virtualized systems have been explored as means of easing IT operation challenges. One of the major benefits of virtualization is the possibility of building a network of virtual machines and storage infrastructure between the virtual data center and external physical networks. A data center involves a large number of networking devices such as switches, routers, and firewalls. With traditional networking, managing networks in data centers is a complex task due to the closed architecture and vertical integration among the networking devices. Software-defined networking (SDN) is a new architectural paradigm, enabling flexible and dynamic management of networks and associated services. This paper presents the benefits of virtualization in general, the advantages of adopting virtualization in data centers, a practical implementation of virtual data centers on OpenStack, and implementing SDN to manage networks in the virtual data center.

The number of data centers has been increased for various reasons such as cloud computing, big-data analysis, multimedia service, etc. With public interests on data center, many novel technologies for data center networks have been proposed and deployed to support data center operations more efficiently and effectively. However, the construction of data center network incurs significant costs. Moreover, various technologies interplay each other to achieve multiple objectives, and it makes difficult to validate and/or verify characteristics of data center network. In addition, it difficult to perform experiments with a number of hosts and switches. Therefore, it is necessary to observe the characteristics of target data center network before building it. A common approach to evaluate data center is to run simulations that should be similar with real-world data center environment. However, generating traffic with the characteristics of data center networks is not matured yet. People still employ a traffic generator based on the characteristics of Internet traffic. We design a traffic generator that shows more accurate characteristics of data center network traffic. Various traffic characteristics exploited explored by several studies are considered. The proposed method generates flow-level network traffic matrix based on Poisson Shot-Noise model. We implemented the traffic generator using Python programming language to create traffic matrix. To evaluate the proposed method, we compare the results with real data center network traffic. Our results show that the generated traffic owns similar characteristics with the real network traffic in terms of flow size, duration, and the mean and variance of total traffic rate.

Data center networks, using a reliable, high speed communication network, is a core component of cloud computing. Recently, optical networks using Space Division Multiplexing has been proposed as a solution to the speed bottleneck anticipated in data center networks. To our knowledge the new challenges of designing such communication systems have not been addressed yet. In this paper we have proposed an optimal approach to the problem of developing a path-protection scheme to handle communication requests in data center (DC) networks using elastic optical networking and space division multiplexing. We have formulated our problem as an Integer Linear Program (ILP). We have also proposed a heuristic that can handle problems of practical size. Our simulations explore important features of our approach.

Given the current expansion of cloud computing, the expected advent of the Internet of Things, and the requirements of future fifth‐generation network infrastructures, significantly larger pools of computational and storage resources will soon be required. This emphasizes the need for more scalable data centers that are capable of providing such an amount of resources in a cost‐effective way. A quick look into today's commercial data centers shows that they tend to rely on variations of well‐defined leaf‐spine/Clos data center network (DCN) topologies, offering low latency, ultrahigh bisectional bandwidth, and enhanced reliability against concurrent failures. However, DCNs are typically restricted by the use of the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) suite, thus suffering limited routing scalability. In this work, we study the benefits that replacing TCP/IP with the recursive internetwork architecture (RINA) can bring into commercial DCNs, focusing on forwarding and routing scalability. We quantitatively evaluate the benefits that RINA solutions can yield against those based on TCP/IP and highlight how, by deploying RINA, topological routing solutions can improve even more the efficiency of the network. To this goal, we propose a rule‐and‐exception forwarding policy tailored to the characteristics of several DCN variants, enabling fast forwarding decisions with merely neighbors' information. Upon failures, few exceptions are necessary, whose computation can also profit from the known topology. Extensive numerical results show that the proposed policy requirements depend mainly on the number of neighbors and concurrent failures in the DCN rather than its size, dramatically reducing the amount of forwarding and routing information stored at DCN nodes.

The information and communication technology nowadays more than ever depends on the Internet and cloud computing, so that the data centers (DCs) have been converted to a constitutive unit of the cloud computing. A DC is composed of two primary parts: servers and Data Center Networks (DCNs). Robustness and scalability are two major challenges of the DCNs that are expanded based on two strategies, scale-out, and scale-up. This paper is distinctive from the related studies in two aspects. The first one is to simultaneously focus on both the scalability and the robustness challenges of the DCNs. For this purpose, we will concentrate on the comparison of robustness in the scalable models of these networks. The second one is, despite the previous work that only evaluated the DCN robustness under topological changes, we evaluated the robustness and fault tolerance against three types of unexpected changes in topology, traffic, and COI (community of interest) in the present work. Hence, we have chosen the network criticality (NC) as a graph-theoretic metric for analyzing DCN robustness. Afterward, we compare some structural and spectral graph metrics with NC among some well-known DCNs, and their scale-out and scale-up. Our results are useful to select the appropriate scaling strategy with the goal of maximizing the robustness of existing DCNs and provide a guideline for designing the new robust and scalable DCN.

Online assignment of non-SDN virtual network nodes to a physical SDN

A survey on architectures and energy efficiency in Data Center Networks

The Visible Light Communication (VLC) has the potential to provide dense and fast connectivity at low cost. In this paper, we propose WSWDC, a novel VLC enabled wireless small-world data center. It employs VLC links to achieve a fully wireless data center network (DCN) across racks for the first time. The using of VLC links eliminates hierarchical switches and inter-rack cables, and thus reducing hardware investment, as well as maintenance cost. More precisely, to simplify the configuration and control operations, we propose three DCN design rationales: (1) fully-wireless, all inter-rack links are wireless; (2) easy-deployable, it is not necessary to change the existing infrastructure inside data center; (3) plug-and-play, no extra centralized control operations are required. Previous proposals, however, cannot achieve the three rationales simultaneously. To this end, we first use regular VLC links to interconnect racks as a regular grid DCN. To further exploiting the benefits of VLC links, a few random VLC links are carefully introduced to update the wireless grid DCN as a wireless small-world DCN. To avoid the potential interference among VLC links, we deploy VLC transceivers at different height on the top of each rack. In this way, VLC links would not interfere with others at each height level. Moreover, we design a greedy but efficient routing method for any pair of racks using their identifiers as inputs. Comprehensive evaluation results indicate that our WSWDC exhibits good network performance.

In the era of cloud computing, data center network (DCN) can consume a significant amount of power (e.g., 10 to 20 percent) in large-scale data centers. To reduce the power consumption of DCN, traffic consolidation has been recently proposed as an effective approach to reduce the number of DCN devices in use. However, existing consolidation approaches do not sufficiently consider the flow completion time (FCT) requirement. On one hand, missing the FCT deadlines can cause serious violation of service-level agreement, especially for delay-sensitive networking services, such as web search and E-commerce. On the other hand, keeping all the devices on to make FCTs much shorter than the desired requirements is unnecessary because 1) users may not be able to perceive the difference, and 2) such a greedy strategy can lead to unnecessarily high DCN power consumption and thus more electricity costs. In this paper, we propose FCTcon, a dynamic FCT control strategy for DCN power optimization. FCTcon is designed rigorously based on control theory to dynamically control the FCT of delay-sensitive traffic flows exactly to the requirements, such that the desired FCT performance is guaranteed while the maximum amount of DCN power savings can be achieved. Results from both hardware experiments and simulation evaluation demonstrate that, compared to the state-of-the-art DCN power optimization schemes, FCTcon can improve the DCN FCT performance, while achieving nearly the same or even more power savings. Consequently, FCTcon can result in more than 22.0 to 62.2 percent extra net profits for a data center with 50K servers. In addition, we further propose two extended designs of FCTcon to handle the coflow abstraction recently proposed for DCN, which successfully reduce the coflow deadline miss ratio by 12 to 15 percent.

Data centers are integral part of cloud computing that support Web services, online social networking, data analysis, computation intensive applications and scientific computing. They require high performance components for their inter-process communication, storage and sub-communication systems. The performance bottleneck that used to be the processing power has now been shifted to communication speed within data centers. The performance of a data center, in terms of throughput and delay, is directly related to the performance of the underlying internal communication network. In this paper, we introduce an analytical model that can be used to evaluate the underlying network architecture in data centers. The model can further be used to develop simulation tools that extend the scope of performance evaluation beyond what it can be achieved by the theoretical model in terms of various network topologies, different traffic distributions, scalability, and load balancing. While the model is generic, we focus on its implementation for fat-tree networks that are widely used in data centers. The theoretical results are compared and validated with the simulation results for several network configurations. The results of this analysis provide a basis for data center network design and optimization.