Catherine Truchan

StEERING: A software-defined networking for inline service chaining

Network operators are faced with the challenge of deploying and managing middleboxes (also called inline services) such as firewalls within their broadband access, datacenter or enterprise networks. Due to the lack of available protocols to route traffic through middleboxes, operators still rely on error-prone and complex low-level configurations to coerce traffic through the desired set of middleboxes. Built upon the recent software-defined networking (SDN) architecture and OpenFlow protocol, this paper proposes StEERING, short for SDN inlinE sERvices and forwardlNG. It is a scalable framework for dynamically routing traffic through any sequence of middleboxes. With simple centralized configuration, StEERING can explicitly steer different types of flows through the desired set of middleboxes, scaling at the level of per-subscriber and per-application policies. With its capability to support flexible routing, we further propose an algorithm to select the best locations for placing services, such that the performance is optimized. Overall, StEERING allows network operators to monetize their middlebox deployment in new ways by allowing subscribers flexibly to select available network services.

Simplified Wireless Connectivity for 5G Machine Type Communication

Ubiquity of applications supporting the networked society demands an efficient communication system to support Machine Type Communication (MTC) devices. The current architecture is not optimized for MTC traffic patterns and therefore, may lead to excessive signaling. In this paper, we propose a simplified approach to wireless connectivity to cope with the requirements of Massive MTC devices. The essence of our solution is based on an optimized and simplified IPv6 connectivity at the existing base stations for a large number of MTC devices while supporting the coexistence of legacy mobile devices. This paper focuses on the core network aspect of the end-to-end connectivity. By analyzing the signaling load we illustrate the feasibility of the proposed solution and demonstrate that it outperforms the existing architecture through simplification of connectivity and elimination of unnecessary functions.