László Toka

NFPA: Network function performance analyzer

With the soar of Software Defined Networking planning a network service becomes harder of a task than ever before. Selecting traditional network elements that provide the best value for money given the performance requirements and the allocated budget is not the only option today: one might also take the software solution on generic hardware alternative. The problem is that the set of available solutions and the possible combinations of software and hardware components in this nowadays alternative is frustratingly vast while the decision maker lacks any clear benchmarking comparison between the existing options. Our solution presented in this paper provides an answer to this critical need: we propose a benchmarking tool that allows the user to measure the important performance metrics of any network function realized on any hardware and software combination, and then to compare the results on a web interface with those of all the setups collected in our database.

Analysis of end-to-end multi-domain management and orchestration frameworks for software defined infrastructures: an architectural survey

Over the last couple of years, industry operators associations issued requirements towards an end-to-end management and orchestration plane for 5G networks. Consequently, standard organisations st ...

Orchestration of Network Services across multiple operators: The 5G Exchange prototype

Future 5G networks will rely on the coordinated allocation of compute, storage, and networking resources in order to meet the functional requirements of 5G services as well as guaranteeing efficient usage of the network infrastructure. However, the 5G service provisioning paradigm will also require a unified infrastructure service market that integrates multiple operators and technologies. The 5G Exchange (5GEx) project, building heavily on the Software-Defined Network (SDN) and the Network Function Virtualization (NFV) functionalities, tries to overcome this market and technology fragmentation by designing, implementing, and testing a multi-domain orchestrator (MdO) prototype for fast and automated Network Service (NS) provisioning over multiple-technologies and spanning across multiple operators. This paper presents a first implementation of the 5GEx MdO prototype obtained by extending existing open source software tools at the disposal of the 5GEx partners. The main functions of the 5GEx MdO prototype are showcased by demonstrating how it is possible to create and deploy NSs in the context of a Slice as a Service (SlaaS) use-case, based on a multi-operator scenario. The 5GEx MdO prototype performance is experimentally evaluated running validation tests within the 5GEx sandbox. The overall time required for the NS deployment has been evaluated considering NSs deployed across two operators.

Controlling Drones from 5G Networks

Envisioned 5G applications are key drivers of the evolution of network and cloud architectures. These novel services pose several challenges on the underlying infrastructure in terms of latency, reliability or capacity, just to mention a few. Controlling or coordinating both indoor and outdoor drones from future networks is a potential application with significant importance. Todays technologies addressing network softwarization, such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV), enable a novel way to create and provision such services. In this demonstration, we showcase an Industry 4.0 use-case including a local factory equipped with drones and local cloud and network facilities connecting to remote cloud resources. The envisioned service is realized by a Service Function Chain (SFC) consisting of network functions and logical connections between them with special requirements. In addition, the envisioned service is integrated with our multi-domain resource orchestration system and as a result, it can be controlled, deployed and monitored from that framework. The use-case and the demo well illustrate several aspects and challenges which should be addressed by future 5G systems.

Policy Injection: A Cloud Dataplane DoS Attack

Enterprises continue to migrate their services to the cloud on a massive scale, but the increasing attack surface has become a natural target for malevolent actors. We show policy injection, a novel algorithmic complexity attack that enables a tenant to add specially tailored ACLs into the data center fabric to mount a denial-of-service attack through exploiting the built-in security mechanisms of the cloud management systems (CMS). Our insight is that certain ACLs, when fed with special covert packets by an attacker, may be very difficult to evaluate, leading to an exhaustion of cloud resources. We show how a tenant can inject seemingly harmless ACLs into the cloud data plane to abuse an algorithmic deficiency in the most popular cloud hypervisor switch, Open vSwitch, and reduce its effective peak performance by 80--90%, and, in certain cases, denying network access altogether.

On Pricing of 5G Services

IT and telco providers are preparing for the era of 5G; in terms of technology, the driving force is virtualization, both for computing and networking. The 5G services will be superior than todays online services not only in technological aspects, but also from an economic and business perspective: fast service creation, effective utilization of resources, dynamic adaption to actual demand are all direct benefits of the virtualized infrastructure. In this paper we study the economic interactions between 5G resource providers and customers: we formalize how resources should be priced and selected for being booked. In particular we show that usage-based pricing is an income-maximizing scheme for providers, and we derive the problem the customers need to solve for cost-optimizing service deployment.

HARMLESS: Cost-Effective Transitioning to SDN

Recently, Software-Defined Networking has grown out of being an intriguing approach and turned into a must-have for communication networks to overcome many long-standing problems of traditional networking. However, there are still some obstacles on the way to the widespread adoption. Current commodity-off-the-shelf (COTS) SDN offerings are still in their infancy and are notorious for lacking standards compliance, scalability, and unpredictable performance indicators compared to their legacy counterparts. On the other hand, recent software-based solutions might mitigate these shortcomings, but in terms of cost-efficiency and port density they are in a lower league. Here, we present HARMLESS, a novel SDN switch design that combines the rapid innovation and upgrade cycles of software switches with the port density of hardware-based appliances into a fully data plane-transparent, vendor-neutral and cost-effective solution for smaller enterprises to gain a foothold in this era. The demo showcases the SDN migration of a dumb legacy Ethernet switch to a powerful, fully reconfigurable, OpenFlow-enabled network device without incurring any major performance and latency penalty, nor any substantial price tag enabling to realize many use cases that would have otherwise needed standalone hardware appliances.

Making the Data Plane Ready for NFV: An Effective Way of Handling Resources

In order to enable carrier grade network services constructed from software-based network functions, we need a novel data plane supporting high performance packet processing, low latency and flexible, fine granular programmability and control. The network functions implemented as virtual machines or containers use the same hardware resources (cpu, memory) as the elements responsible for networking, therefore, a low-level resource orchestrator which is capable of jointly controlling these resources is an indispensable component. In this demonstration, we showcase our novel resource orchestrator (FERO) on top of a data plane making use of open-source components such as, Docker, DPDK and OVS. It is capable of i) generating an abstract model of the underlying hardware architecture during the bootstrap process, ii) mapping the incoming network service requests to available resources based on our recently proposed Service Graph embedding engine and the generated graph model. The impact of the orchestration decision is shown on-the-fly by real-time performance measurements on a graphical dashboard.

The orchestration in 5G exchange — A multi-provider NFV framework for 5G services

The goal of the 5G Exchange project is to enable cross-domain orchestration of services over multiple administrations. The system we build allows the end-to-end integration of heterogeneous resource and service elements of a multi-vendor technology environment from multiple operators by sharing their network and compute infrastructures via NFV orchestration. We will run an industry control 5G use-case, where one of the VNFs is offered by a 3rd party solution provider as a VNFaaS. We will show i) full automation for end-to-end network service orchestration over multi-provider NFV and VNFaaS offerings with latency and high availability constraints; ii) actor-role models and business interactions and iii) how — with a feedback loop to lifecycle management — the system can adapt to changes.