Luis Cordeiro

The QueuePusher: Enabling Queue Management in OpenFlow

The evolution of Software-Defined Networking and the overall acceptance of protocols such as OpenFlow, demonstrates the added value of decoupling the data plane from the control plane. Existing SDN Controllers enable the expected flexibility from such networks by dynamically providing a fine-grained control of each flow. However, hardware-specific configurations, such as the creation of queues or other mechanisms is out of the scope of these controllers. This work presents an extension to a well known OpenFlow controller (Floodlight) to efficiently handle the management of Traffic Control Queues in OpenFlow switches, resorting to a RESTful northbound interface. The obtained results demonstrate further possibility of developing innovative on-demand resource reservation mechanisms in SDN without adding unbearable overheads.

Demonstrating Resilient Quality of Service in Software Defined Networking

Software defined Networking (SDN) such as Open-Flow decouples the control plane from forwarding devices and embeds it into one or more external entities called controllers. We implemented a framework in OpenFlow through which business customers receive higher Quality of Service (QoS) than best-effort customers in all conditions (e.g. failure conditions). In the demonstration, we stream video clips (business and best-effort customers traffic) through an emulated OpenFlow topology. During the demonstration, we trigger a failure in the paths of video clips and show an effectively higher QoS for business customers when compared against best-effort customers. This is demonstrated by simply watching the video clips at the receiver.

Toward a Fully Cloudified Mobile Network Infrastructure

Cloud computing enables the on-demand delivery of resources for a multitude of services and gives the opportunity for small agile companies to compete with large industries. In the telco world, cloud computing is currently mostly used by mobile network operators (MNO) for hosting non-critical support services and selling cloud services such as applications and data storage. MNOs are investigating the use of cloud computing to deliver key telecommunication services in the access and core networks. Without this, MNOs lose the opportunities of both combining this with over-the-top (OTT) and value-added services to their fundamental service offerings and leveraging cost-effective commodity hardware. Being able to leverage cloud computing technology effectively for the telco world is the focus of mobile cloud networking (MCN). This paper presents the key results of MCN integrated project that includes its architecture advancements, prototype implementation, and evaluation. Results show the efficiency and the simplicity that a MNO can deploy and manage the complete service lifecycle of fully cloudified, composed services that combine OTT/IT- and mobile-network-based services running on commodity hardware. The extensive performance evaluation of MCN using two key proof-of-concept scenarios that compose together many services to deliver novel converged elastic, on-demand mobile-based but innovative OTT services proves the feasibility of such fully virtualized deployments. Results show that it is beneficial to extend cloud computing to telco usage and run fully cloudified mobile-network-based systems with clear advantages and new service opportunities for MNOs and end-users.

Tutamen: An Integrated Personal Mobile and Adaptable Video Platform for Health and Protection

A framework for mobile and portable High-Definition Video streaming is proposed, developed and assessed. Suitable for emergency scenarios, involving for instance ambulances and fire-fighters, the presented framework resorts to a state-of-art platform which considers off-the-shelf hardware and available video codecs for High-Definition Video. The obtained results show that the proposed architecture is able to efficiently support rescuing teams in the demanding scenarios where they operate, guaranteeing video quality and ease of use. This solution is particularly useful for situations where experts in the fields can accurately provide their insights and contributions remotely and in a timely fashion.

LiveCity: A Secure Live Video-to-Video Interactive City Infrastructure

In typical video-to-video transmissions, security and confidentiality is becoming an issue of greater importance, but these features come at a cost. In mobile environments, where CPU time is a valuable resource, such features should be thoroughly thought over as they usually require heavy computational resources. In this paper a short analysis on existing streaming solutions, standardised and otherwise, is performed while taking into consideration the scope of the LiveCity project of developing applications destined to the end-user. An analysis of different transmission protocols and their specifications, as well as encryption protocols designed to work on top of streamed data, is performed as a means to access which specifications better fit LiveCity requirements.

Enabling a Mobility Prediction-Aware Follow-Me Cloud Model

The location of data centres is crucial when mobile network operators are moving towards cloudified mobile networks to optimize resource utilization and to improve performance of services. Quality of Experience (QoE) can be enhanced in terms of content access latency, by placing user content at locations where they will be present in the future. The Follow-Me Cloud (FMC) concept aims at optimising operations of moving Mobile Network Operators Services towards cloudified environments, where Information Centric Networking (ICN) and the appropriate content migration policies are of paramount importance. However, several factors need to be considered, including user movements and mobility prediction (MP), content popularity, and migration. This paper addresses all these aspects by implementing a fully integrated multi-criteria FMC and mobility prediction mechanisms (MP-FMC) on a cloud infrastructure. Experimental evaluation shows that MP-FMC can be orchestrated on-demand within a reasonable time frame, and it could deliver ≈ 33% improvement of content retrieval time.

Towards a High Performance DNSaaS Deployment

The existence of the Domain Name Service (DNS) is a vital service for the Internet, being much more than a simple translation mechanism, allowing more high-profiled functionalities such as load-balancing or enhanced content distribution. With the current trend towards Cloud Computing, employing DNS as a Service (DNSaaS) in this paradigm contributes to the decentralisation of this service, improving its robustness and overall flexibility. In order to consider it multiple tenants must be supported among other advanced features, authentication of operations and support multiple DNS backends, providing an adequate interface as well (e.g., a RESTfull interface). While such characteristics seem promising, to the best of our knowledge this is the first paper to assess the performance of DNSaaS. The performed evaluation comprise a thorough set of experiments, demonstrating how the configuration of several simultaneous tenants can be supported, performing several operations, within acceptable response time. Moreover, by assessing the performance of the used DNS backend, results highlighted that the evaluated DNSaaS solution was able to support to \({\approx }36500\) DNS queries per second.

HyPath: An Approach for Hybrid On-Path Off-Path End-to-End Signaling

In a multi-domain Internet that offers quality of service guaranties, there is the need of signaling among the domain entities that are responsible for the management of quality of service. Because different domains have different network protocols and topologies, there is no solution that is able to signal these entities using an off-path approach and, in particular, that is able to interwork with the on-path signaling mechanisms. The HyPath approach extends the NSIS framework and its interactions with the local routing protocols to achieve off- path signaling in these hybrid environments. This document presents HyPath and its evaluation on a test-bed, showing that the mechanisms proposed have the potential to perform off-path signaling without introducing an excessive overhead in the network.

Next-generation communication systems for PPDR: the SALUS perspective

Abstract Public Protection and Disaster Relief (PPDR) agencies in European member states currently rely on digital Private Mobile Radio (PMR) networks for mission critical operations. PMR networks are based on two main standards for Europe: Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA) and TETRAPOL. These networks provide secure and resilient mobile voice services, as well as basic data services. However, these traditional PMR networks show substantial limitations, when matched against modern requirements of PPDR agencies, including broadcast communications, dynamic secure groups, secure roaming, and emerging safety and security applications. Moreover, there are significant interoperability constraints when using multiple technologies, such as inter-technology coverage limitations, which can result in ineffective management of emergency events, both at national level as well as in cross-border regions.

Modern Video-to-Video Communications to Enhance Citizens’ Quality of Life and Create Opportunities for Growth in “Smart” European Cities

The LiveCity Project effort structures a city-based “Living-Lab” and associated ecosystem to “pilot” and test live interactive high-definition video-to-video (v2v) on ultrafast wireless and wireline Internet infrastructure for the support of suitably selected public service use cases also involving a number of city user communities in five major European cities (Athens, Dublin, Luxembourg (city), Valladolid and Greifswald). The “core” target is to allow the citizens of a city to interact with each other in a more productive, efficient and socially useful way by using v2v over the Internet in a variety of distinct use cases that discussed and analysed, in detail, in the present work.