Fung Po Tso

The Glasgow Raspberry Pi Cloud: A Scale Model for Cloud Computing Infrastructures

Data Centers (DC) used to support Cloud services often consist of tens of thousands of networked machines under a single roof. The significant capital outlay required to replicate such infrastructures constitutes a major obstacle to practical implementation and evaluation of research in this domain. Currently, most research into Cloud computing relies on either limited software simulation, or the use of a testbed environments with a handful of machines. The recent introduction of the Raspberry Pi, a low-cost, low-power single-board computer, has made the construction of a miniature Cloud DCs more affordable. In this paper, we present the Glasgow Raspberry Pi Cloud (PiCloud), a scale model of a DC composed of clusters of Raspberry Pi devices. The PiCloud emulates every layer of a Cloud stack, ranging from resource virtualisation to network behaviour, providing a full-featured Cloud Computing research and educational environment.

Mobility: a double-edged sword for HSPA networks: a large-scale test on Hong Kong mobile HSPA networks

This paper presents an empirical study on the performance of mobile High Speed Packet Access (a 3.5G cellular standard usually abbreviated as HSPA) networks in Hong Kong via extensive field tests. Our study, from the viewpoint of end users, covers virtually all possible mobile scenarios in urban areas, including subways, trains, off-shore ferries, and city buses. We have confirmed that mobility has largely negative impacts on the performance of HSPA networks, as fast-changing wireless environment causes serious service deterioration or even interruption. Meanwhile, our field experiment results have shown unexpected new findings and thereby exposed new features of the mobile HSPA networks, which contradict commonly held views. We surprisingly find out that mobility can improve fairness of bandwidth sharing among users and traffic flows. Also, the triggering and final results of handoffs in mobile HSPA networks are unpredictable and often inappropriate, thus calling for fast reacting fallover mechanisms. Moreover, we find that throughput performance does not monotonically decrease with increased mobility level. We have conducted in-depth research to furnish detailed analysis and explanations to what we have observed. We conclude that mobility is a double-edged sword for HSPA networks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first public report on a large-scale empirical study on the performance of commercial mobile HSPA networks.

Improving Data Center Network Utilization Using Near-Optimal Traffic Engineering

Equal cost multiple path (ECMP) forwarding is the most prevalent multipath routing used in data center (DC) networks today. However, it fails to exploit increased path diversity that can be provided by traffic engineering techniques through the assignment of nonuniform link weights to optimize network resource usage. To this extent, constructing a routing algorithm that provides path diversity over nonuniform link weights (i.e., unequal cost links), simplicity in path discovery and optimality in minimizing maximum link utilization (MLU) is nontrivial. In this paper, we have implemented and evaluated the Penalizing Exponential Flow-spliTing (PEFT) algorithm in a cloud DC environment based on two dominant topologies, canonical and fat tree. In addition, we have proposed a new cloud DC topology which, with only a marginal modification of the current canonical tree DC architecture, can further reduce MLU and increase overall network capacity utilization through PEFT routing.

Performance Evaluation of Scheduling in IEEE 802.16 Based Wireless Mesh Networks

We propose an efficient centralized scheduling algorithm in IEEE 802.16 based wireless mesh networks (WMN) to provide high qualified wireless multimedia services. Our algorithm takes special attention on the relay function of the mesh nodes in a transmission tree which is seldom studied in previous research. Some important design metrics, such as fairness, channel utilization and transmission delay are considered in this scheduling algorithm. IEEE 802.16 employs TDMA and the selection policy for scheduled links in a time slot will definitely impact the system performance. We evaluated the proposed algorithm with four selection criteria through extensive simulations and the results are instrumental for improving the performance of IEEE 802.16 based WMNs in terms of link scheduling

Implementing Scalable, Network-Aware Virtual Machine Migration for Cloud Data Centers

Virtualization has been key to the success of Cloud Computing through the on-demand allocation of shared hardware resources to Virtual Machines (VM)s. However, the network-agnostic placement of VMs over the underlying network topology can itself be a factor of performance degradation by causing congestion at the core layers of the infrastructure where bandwidth is heavily oversubscribed. In this paper, we design and implement S-CORE, a scalable live VM migration scheme to dynamically reallocate VMs to servers while minimizing the overall communication footprint of active traffic flows. We evaluate S- CORE over diverse aggregate load and coordination policies. Our results show that it can achieve up to a 87% communication cost reduction with a limited number of migration rounds, and can be easily accommodated within commodity hardware and hypervisor architectures. The associated memory, CPU, and network overhead are also minimum under typical Cloud Data Center workloads.

Blind Detection of Spread Spectrum Flow Watermarks

Recently, the direct sequence spread-spectrum (DSSS)-based technique has been proposed to trace anonymous network flows. In this technique, homogeneous pseudo-noise (PN) codes are used to modulate multiple-bit signals that are embedded into the target flow as watermarks. This technique could be mali- ciously used to degrade an anonymous communication network. In this paper, we propose a simple single flow-based scheme to detect the existence of these watermarks. Our investigation shows that even if we have no knowledge of the applied PN code, we are still able to detect malicious DSSS watermarks via mean-square autocorrelation (MSAC) of a single modulated flows traffic rate time series. MSAC shows periodic peaks due to self-similarity in the modulated traffic caused by homogeneous PN codes that are used in modulating multiple-bit signals. Our scheme has low complexity and does not require any PN-code synchronization. We evaluate this detection schemes effectiveness via simulations and real-world experiments on Tor. Our results demonstrate a high detection rate with a low false positive rate. Our scheme is more flexible and accurate than an existing multi-flow-based approach in DSSS watermark detection.

Scalable Traffic-Aware Virtual Machine Management for Cloud Data Centers

Virtual Machine (VM) management is a powerful mechanism for providing elastic services over Cloud Data Centers (DC)s. At the same time, the resulting network congestion has been repeatedly reported as the main bottleneck in DCs, even when the overall resource utilization of the infrastructure remains low. However, most current VM management strategies are traffic-agnostic, while the few that are traffic-aware only concern a static initial allocation, ignore bandwidth oversubscription, or do not scale. In this paper we present S-CORE, a scalable VM migration algorithm to dynamically reallocate VMs to servers while minimizing the overall communication footprint of active traffic flows. We formulate the aggregate VM communication as an optimization problem and we then define a novel distributed migration scheme that iteratively adapts to dynamic traffic changes. Through extensive simulation and implementation results, we show that S-CORE achieves significant (up to 87%) communication cost reduction while incurring minimal overhead and downtime.

WeFiLab: A Web-Based WiFi Laboratory Platform for Wireless Networking Education

Remote access to physical laboratories for education has received significant attention from both researchers and educators as it provides access at reduced cost in sharing manner of real devices and gives students practical training. With the rapid growing of wireless technologies, it has become an essential of learning to have the hand-on experience on wireless networking for the proliferated number of students in engineering. Some of current implementations for wireless networking are either using simulations, which lose the reality, or too complicated for undergraduate students to control experiments. In this paper, we present a practical online laboratory platform, Web-based WiFi Laboratory (WeFiLab). WeFiLab mainly focuses on providing students hand-on experience of doing experiments on real devices through webpage anytime anywhere. It uses the structure of two-level operations, which facilities increasing the scale of wireless devices and allows WeFiLab to be extended to more complicated operations. The schedule schemes of WeFiLab let more students share and make efficient use of wireless devices. A prototype of WeFiLab has been implemented and used successfully as complements for an undergraduate course for two years in a university. In total, 315 computer science students attended the evaluation.

Mobility: A Double-Edged Sword for HSPA Networks: A Large-Scale Test on Hong Kong Mobile HSPA Networks

This paper presents an empirical study on the performance of mobile High Speed Packet Access (a 3.5G cellular standard usually abbreviated as HSPA) networks in Hong Kong via extensive field tests. Our study, from the viewpoint of end users, covers virtually all possible mobile scenarios in urban areas, including subways, trains, off-shore ferries, and city buses. We have confirmed that mobility has largely negative impacts on the performance of HSPA networks, as fast-changing wireless environment causes serious service deterioration or even interruption. Meanwhile, our field experiment results have shown unexpected new findings and thereby exposed new features of the mobile HSPA networks, which contradict commonly held views. We surprisingly find out that mobility can improve fairness of bandwidth sharing among users and traffic flows. Also, the triggering and final results of handoffs in mobile HSPA networks are unpredictable and often inappropriate, thus calling for fast reacting fallover mechanisms. Moreover, we find that throughput performance does not monotonically decrease with increased mobility level. We have conducted in-depth research to furnish detailed analysis and explanations to what we have observed. We conclude that mobility is a double-edged sword for HSPA networks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first public report on a large-scale empirical study on the performance of commercial mobile HSPA networks.

Synergistic policy and virtual machine consolidation in cloud data centers

In modern Cloud Data Centers (DC)s, correct implementation of network policies is crucial to provide secure, efficient and high performance services for tenants. It is reported that the inefficient management of network policies accounts for 78% of DC downtime, challenged by the dynamically changing network characteristics and by the effects of dynamic Virtual Machine (VM) consolidation. While there has been significant research in policy and VM management, they have so far been treated as disjoint research problems. In this paper, we explore the simultaneous, dynamic VM and policy consolidation, and formulate the Policy-VM Consolidation (PVC) problem, which is shown to be NP-Hard. We then propose Sync, an efficient and synergistic scheme to jointly consolidate network policies and virtual machines. Extensive evaluation results and a testbed implementation of our controller show that policy and VM migration under Sync significantly reduces flow end-to-end delay by nearly 40%, and network-wide communication cost by 50% within few seconds, while adhering strictly to the requirements of network policies.