Lisa Donatini

A network control application enabling Software-Defined Quality of Service

The constant growth in IT as well as the increase of users and services requirements are making communication networking more and more complex to manage. This is why there has been the need to look for new approaches. One very promising solution is Software Defined Networking (SDN) that decouples the data and control planes, having one centralized controller for the network. This gives chances to control and manage the network as desired, thus opening many new possibilities. In this work we chose to exploit SDN to enable QoS control, starting from existing tools (Floodlight) and making modifications in order to better exploit their potential. A new network control application for end-to-end QoS provisioning is built on top of Floodlight and validated in an emulated SDN environment.

An SDN orchestrator for resources chaining in cloud data centers

The oversubscription of intra-Data Center links and the high volatility of Virtual Machine deployments require a flexible and agile control of the Data Center network infrastructure, possibly coordinated with computing and storage resources control. In this scenario, the Software-Defined Networking paradigm opens up new opportunities to design orchestrated resources control strategies able to meet the dynamically-changing traffic demands of instantiated Virtual Machines. This paper presents the architectural design of an SDN-based orchestrator for dynamic computing and communication resources chaining, able to assure better than best effort VMs data exchanges across Cloud Data Centers. Moreover, the paper evaluates a number of different chaining strategies able to dynamically compose proper pool of resources based on their variable load. Such strategies are compared against specific management objectives using both simulations and experiments showing their effectiveness in terms of resource usage and service provisioning rate.

Advances in LTE network monitoring: A step towards an SDN solution

Monitoring operations in todays mobile networks is becoming a more and more challenging task due to the higher bandwidth and technological complexity brought by LTE. The paper summarizes some relevant problems that arose in the tests of LTE equipment carried out at Telecom Italia Lab (TILAB, thtechnological complexitye R&D center of Telecom Italia), and presents an ongoing project that aims at realizing a flexible hardware/software platform to cope with these problems at reasonable costs. The ultimate goal of this research is to develop a Software Defined Networking (SDN) measurements platform, which permits to easily and dynamically configure the measurement devices involved in the test and monitoring functions according to the requirements defined by the operator. Furthermore, the paper proposes the integration of the designed framework in a realistic lab environment, and discusses the improvements introduced to the actual architecture.

An OpenFlow controller for cloud data centers: Experimental setup and validation

Nowadays, Data Centers are the primary infrastructures for Cloud Computing services provisioning. In this challenging scenario, Data Centers have to deal with highly dynamic workloads, thus not only should they adopt advanced software virtualization solutions, but also network control capabilities. Elastic, agile network connectivity control should be integrated with the computing management infrastructure to make it achieve its goals. This paper presents an OF-based controller, called OFVN, that enables novel virtualization-aware networking functions in Cloud DCs. Virtual Machines allocations are performed considering the availability of computational resources on physical server, but also selecting a forwarding path for VMs data flows based on network links utilization. The focus of the paper is on the implementation and assessment of the controller in an experimental testbed. The behaviour of different allocation strategies is also investigated.

Design and evaluation of SDN-based orchestration system for cloud data centers

We present an SDN-based orchestration system that enables automated and coordinated arrangement of both computing and network resources in virtualized DC environments. The orchestrator is validated through a set of simulations, as well as through experiments carried out in a real laboratory. Results show that the proposed orchestration system improves the service requests acceptance rate and the utilization of network resources, while minimizing degradations of the user experience. Thus, DC resources can be effectively exploited, and different management objectives (e.g., load balancing, energy saving) can be reached.

Cloud and network service orchestration in software defined data centers

Cloud Data Centers are becoming a more and more important reality nowadays, as more and more services are being offered in the form of Cloud resources. In order to accommodate as many requests as possible, Data Centers typically deploy oversubscription, which requires a thoughtfully calibrated usage of the computing and network resources of the system. We especially need to re-think the usage of network resources, as the kinds of demands from applications we see today have more stringent network requirements than in the past. The Software-Defined Network paradigm offers new tools to manage the network in agile, flexible ways, according to specific needs. It enables to build new customized functions in order, for example, to monitor the instantaneous load of traffic, slice the network, route each flow according to specific policies that can be modified accordingly with the needs of the system. In this paper we present an orchestrator for Software-Defined Data Center, and the strategies used to allocate Virtual Machines, basing our decisions on the current state of the system.

IT and network SDN orchestrator for Cloud Data Center

This demo deals with a new orchestrator, the OFVN controller, specifically designed, according to the SDN principles, to deliver Cloud services with IT and network resources requirements.

Design and development of management functions for distributed monitoring based on SDN-based network

In the latest years, we have seen a fast evolution of Internet systems and a remarkable increase of the number and variety of services required. The need of new architectural solutions has led to the creation of new tools that allow to develop more flexible and dynamic networks. Software Defined Networking (SDN) goes in this direction, offering a new way to manage networks, based on programmability, virtualization of the network and centralization of decision processes. In this article we will analyse how it is possible to deploy these new tools to realize some fundamental network functions also for monitoring systems. We will also show a real testbed where we implemented the functions we describe, and we will show the experimental results obtained with it.

An open-source hardware approach for high performance low-cost QoS monitoring of VoIP traffic

A key issue in VoIP services market is the availability of tools that permit a constant monitoring of the relevant Quality of Service (QoS) parameters. Several commercial and open-source solutions are available, based on dedicated hardware and/or open-source software. These solutions aim to achieve a tradeoff between performance and instrumentation cost. In general, high performance and precise monitoring tools are based on dedicated hardware, which is expensive. In contrast, cheaper software-based solutions working on top of a Commercially available Off-The-Shelf (COTS) hardware are performance-limited, especially when serving high-capacity links. In this context, the paper presents an open-source solution for QoS monitoring of VoIP traffic that achieves high performance at significantly lower costs. The proposed solution exploits the performance capabilities achievable with a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The associated costs reduction arises from the high flexibility of an FPGA. Our experimental analysis explores the accuracy of the developed prototype, measuring against relevant QoS parameters of VoIP traffic on high capacity links.