Pasquale Donadio

Energy Efficiency in integrated IT and optical network infrastructures: The GEYSERS approach

In this paper we propose energy efficient design and operation of infrastructures incorporating integrated optical network and IT resources. For the first time we quantify significant energy savings of a complete solution jointly optimizing the allocation and provisioning of both network and IT resources. Our approach involves virtualization of the infrastructure resources and it is proposed and developed in the framework of the European project GEYSERS - Generalised Architecture for Dynamic Infrastructure Services.

The Green Abstraction Layer: A Standard Power-Management Interface for Next-Generation Network Devices

In telecommunications networks, distributed power management across heterogeneous hardware requires a standardized representation of each systems capabilities to decouple distributed high-level algorithms from hardware specifics. The Green Abstraction Layer (GAL) provides this interface between high-level algorithms and a lower level representing the hardware and physical resources that directly exert energy management and actions in a network.

Bringing optical networks to the cloud: an architecture for a sustainable future internet

Over the years, the Internet has become a central tool for society. The extent of its growth and usage raises critical issues associated with its design principles that need to be addressed before it reaches its limits. Many emerging applications have increasing requirements in terms of bandwidth, QoS and manageability. Moreover, applications such as Cloud computing and 3D-video streaming require optimization and combined provisioning of different infrastructure resources and services that include both network and IT resources. Demands become more and more sporadic and variable, making dynamic provisioning highly needed. As a huge energy consumer, the Internet also needs to be energyconscious. Applications critical for society and business (e.g., health, finance) or for real-time communication demand a highly reliable, robust and secure Internet. Finally, the future Internet needs to support sustainable business models, in order to drive innovation, competition, and research. Combining optical network technology with Cloud technology is key to addressing the future Internet/Cloud challenges. In this context, we propose an integrated approach: realizing the convergence of the IT- and optical-network-provisioning models will help bring revenues to all the actors involved in the value chain. Premium advanced network and IT managed services integrated with the vanilla Internet will ensure a sustainable future Internet/Cloud enabling demanding and ubiquitous applications to coexist.

A northbound interface for power management in next generation network devices

Recently, a number of approaches based on dynamic power management techniques have been proposed to reduce the energy consumption of telecommunication networks and devices. They are able to optimize the trade-off between network performance and energy requirements. It is possible to execute and extend these techniques to the whole network, by using local control policies together with energy-aware routing and traffic engineering. However, the lack of a standardized representation of the energy-aware capabilities of heterogeneous networking equipment makes their deployment confusing and impractical. To this aim, we have proposed a novel framework, the green abstraction layer (GAL), whose purpose is to define a multi-layered abstraction interface for the hardware and physical resources, where energy management actions are directly performed. Therefore, the GAL syntax can be exposed to the platform-independent logical representation commonly used in network control protocols. Given the internal architectural complexity and heterogeneity of many network devices, the GAL approach is based on a hierarchical decomposition, where each level provides an abstract and aggregated representation of internal components.

Overall Requirements for Global Information Multimedia Communication Village 10th Strategic Workshop

The foundations for the definition of the network of the future should be based on a correct user and community characterizations to minimize the fragmentation of the experiences during the global interactions with information communication infrastructures. This paper describes some of the complex objectives and main challenges that telecommunication solution and services have to deal with in order to respect both specific requirements of global user interactions, habits and personalization, and framework requirements about green environments.

Exporting data-plane energy-aware capabilities from network devices toward the control plane: The Green Abstraction Layer

Energy efficiency is well-known to have recently become one of the most important aspects for both todays and tomorrows telecommunications infrastructures. To curb their energy requirements, next-generation hardware platforms of network devices are expected to include advanced power management capabilities, which may allow a dynamic trade-off between power consumption and network performance. At the same time, network protocols are going to evolve in order to carry energy-aware information, and to add them to classical performance indexes in network optimisation strategies. However, the question of how to map energy-aware indexes, often arising from low-level local hardware details, and the ones related to network performance is still an open issue. Starting from these considerations, we propose the Green Abstraction Layer (GAL), a device internal interface that provides a standard way of accessing and organising energy-aware information from the low-level hardware components to control processes. The GAL is specifically designed to hide the heterogeneous hardware implementation details, and to provide a simple, hierarchical, and common view of underlying power management capabilities to network control processes.

A PCE-based architecture for the management of virtualized infrastructures

The emerging Network Function Virtualization paradigm (NFV) is a disruptive change that creates new business opportunities for vendors and carriers. By exploiting virtualization technologies, it allows the dynamic creation of logically isolated infrastructures over abstracted physical networks. To be able to offer Virtualized Services efficiently, service providers need a new class of Management systems able to manage and orchestrate both network and IT virtualized resources. In this paper, we propose an enhanced network Control Plane, based on the standard Path Computation Element (PCE) architecture, which is able to jointly make network routing and IT server provisioning decisions and that can be used in an NFV environment.

Virtual intrusion detection systems in the cloud

With the increasing popularity of cloud networks, serious issues around security for ubiquitous hosts will need to be addressed. In this paper we focus on a virtual intrusion detection system (V-IDS). We present a new architecture that uses the basic principles of cloud computing, virtualization, and the Generalized Multiprotocol Label Switching (GMPLS) control plane and applies them to intrusion detection systems, in order to protect cloud networks characterized by a constantly changing underlying infrastructure and physical topology. Our research is not focused on new algorithms or products capable of solving the security problem in cloud networks: our goal is to define a process and a novel architecture that minimizes the security risk in distributed networks, implementing the principle that network security and reliability is not a “product,” but a well defined “process.” On the basis of the defined architecture we have implemented a prototype cloud-based IDS that validates our thesis. The prototype is realized though the integration of two open source technologies: OpenNebula and Dynamic Resource Allocation via GMPLS Optical Networks (DRAGON).

Transformation Dataflow in Multimedia Software Engineering Using TAO_XML: A Component-Based Approach

Multimedia Software Engineering (MSE) is a new frontier for both Software Engineering (SE) and Visual Languages (VL). In fact multimedia software engineering can be considered as the discipline for systematic specification, design, substitution and verification of patterns that are often visual. Visual Languages give such contributions to MSE as: Visual notation for software specification, design and verification flow charts, ER diagram, Petri Net, UML visualization, visual programming languages etc. Multimedia Software Engineering and Software Engineering are like two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, we can apply software engineering principles to the design of multimedia systems. On the other hand, we can apply multimedia technologies to the practice of software engineering. In this paper we deal with the first of these topics. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how it is possible to design and implement complex multimedia software systems using a TeleAction Object (TAO) transformer based on XML technology with a component-based multimedia software engineering approach. The paper shows a complete process of dataflow transformation that represents TAOs in different ways (text, TAO_XML, etc) and at different levels of abstraction. The transformation process is a reversible one. We will also show the first experiences conducted jointly from DIS, DCSI, and DMI laboratories using a tool named TAO_XML_T. The tools component-based architecture is also discussed in the paper.

Dynamic Routing and Virtual Machine Consolidation in Green Clouds

In the last few years, there has been a remarkable growth in the number of data centers, which represent one of the leading sources of increased business data traffic on the Internet. An effect of the growing scale and the wide use of data centers is the dramatic increase of power consumption, with significant consequences both in terms of environmental and operational costs. Hence, energy awareness has become one of the major design constraints for Cloud infrastructures. In order to face these challenges, a new generation of energy-efficient and ecosustainable network infrastructures is needed. In this work, a novel energy-aware resource orchestration framework for distributed Cloud infrastructures is introduced, in order to manage both network and IT resources in a typical optical backbone. A high-level overview of the system architecture is provided by focusing on the definition of the different layers of the whole infrastructure, and introducing the Path Computation Element, which is the key component of the proposed architecture. The aim is to explain how both network and IT resources can be managed while, at the same time, the overall power consumption is being minimized and QoS requirements are satisfied. Finally, a green migration plan that is obtained by applying Virtual Machine relocation algorithms is discussed, in order to dynamically react to the fluctuating resource requirements of the VMs