Roberto Bifulco

Integrating a network IDS into an open source Cloud Computing environment

The success of the Cloud Computing paradigm may be jeopardized by concerns about the risk of misuse of this model aimed at conducting illegal activities. In this paper we address the issue of detecting Denial of Service attacks performed by means of resources acquired on-demand on a Cloud Computing platform. To this purpose, we propose to investigate the consequences of the use of a distributed strategy to detect and block attacks, or other malicious activities, originated by misbehaving customers of a Cloud Computing provider. In order to check the viability of our approach, we also evaluate the impact on performance of our proposed solution. This paper presents the installation and deployment experience of a distributed defence strategy and illustrates the preliminary results of the performance evaluation.

Scalability of a mobile cloud management system

Ubiquitous network access allows people to access an ever increasing range of services from a variety of mobile terminals, including laptops, tablets and smartphones. A flexible and economically efficient way of provisioning such services is through Cloud Computing. Assuming that several cloud-enabled datacenters are made available at the edges of the Internet, service providers may take advantage of them by optimally locating service instances as close as possible to their users. By localizing traffic at the edges of access networks, such an approach may result beneficial for both service and network providers. In this paper we present Follow-Me Cloud (FMC), a technology developed at NEC Laboratories Europe that allows transparent migration of services in TCP/IP networks, thanks to the dynamic configuration of a set of coordinated OpenFlow switches located at the edge of the network. In particular, in this paper we analyze the scalability properties of an FMC-based system and propose a role separation strategy based on distribution of control plane functions which enables scale-out of the system. By means of simulation, we prove that the application of the proposed separation strategy results in less state retained by individual OpenFlow controllers and in more effective localization of network traffic.

Transparent migration of virtual infrastructures in large datacenters for Cloud computing

Cloud-enabled datacenters need advanced support for an integrated management of platform virtualization technologies. The networking infrastructure of large-scale datacenters is implemented according to redundant multi-tiered architectures whose layers operate at Layer 3 of the networking stack. Splitting the network infrastructure of a datacenter in a number of IP subnets, however, creates limits to the migration of Virtual Machines, reducing the possibility for administrators to efficiently balance the load and reduce the energy consumption of the whole infrastructure. In this paper we propose an innovative solution that allows transparent migration of Virtual Machines across the whole datacenter, based on the coordinated use of NAT rules that need to be consistently managed across the layers of the datacenter networking infrastructure. We describe in details how our approach can be easily implemented with current network devices without any modification to their hardware and present an experimental evaluation of an early prototype of our solution.

Analysis of the handover procedure in Follow-Me Cloud

Follow-Me Cloud (FMC) allows transparent migration of end-points (users and services) in TCP/IP networks. In this paper we describe in details the FMC handover procedures and analyze the parameters that may affect their performance. Our analysis suggests possible optimizations for such procedures.

A Practical Experience in Designing an OpenFlow Controller

Software Defined Networking (SDN in short) is reshaping the future of computer networks. By decoupling control and data planes, SDN technologies allow a more flexible management of network infrastructures, whose resources may be operated by means of a well defined programming interface. Several approaches have been recently proposed to implement the SDN concept. OpenFlow is maybe the most prominent SDN component, having been supported by several device vendors. This paper discusses a practical experience in designing an OpenFlowcontroller for a Mobile Cloud Management system. We present the programming model and the designed abstraction and discuss the lesson learned.

GaaS: customized grids in the clouds

Cloud Computing has been widely adopted as a new paradigm for providing resources because of the advantages it brings to both users and providers. Even if it was firstly targeted at enterprises wishing to reduce their equipment management costs, it has been rapidly recognized as both an enabler for new applications and as a mean to allow enterprises of all sizes at running high demanding applications. Recently, Cloud Providers are trying to attract new applications, such as scientific ones, that today already benefit from distributed environment like Grids. This work presents a way to remove the paradigm mismatch between Cloud and Grid Computing, enabling the use of Cloud-provided resources with well-established Grid-like interfaces, avoiding the need for users to learn new resources access and use models. The proposed approach is validated through the development of a prototype implementation and its integration in a working Grid environment.

Experimenting with P2P traffic optimization for wireless mesh networks in a federated OMF-PlanetLab environment

The ultimate success of the Wireless Mesh Network paradigm (WMN) in large scale deployments depends on the ability to test it in real world scenarios. A typical application scenario which is worth to be investigated in such a context is peer-to-peer traffic management. The creation of large scale testbeds for evaluating wireless mesh technologies and protocols, and for testing their ability to support real world applications in realistic environments, is then a crucial step. OMF (cOntrol and Management Framework) is a well-established control, measurement, and management framework for wireless testbeds. In this paper we present how we integrated an OMF-based wireless testbed in the planetary-scale PlanetLab testbed, making it possible for PlanetLab users to run experiments spanning on both PlanetLab and an OMF-based wireless testbed. In order to demonstrate the usefulness of such an integrated scenario, we tested on it an innovative peer-to-peer traffic optimization technique for the BitTorrent file sharing application. The possibility of running this kind of experiments highlighted several real-world issues which could be investigated thanks to our hybrid experimental scenario.

Dynamic virtual cluster reconfiguration for efficient IaaS provisioning

Cloud computing is an emerging paradigm to provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). In this paper we present NEPTUNE-IaaS, a software system able to support the whole lifecycle of IaaS provisioning in a Virtual Cluster environment. Our system allows interactive design of complex system topologies and their efficient mapping onto the available physical resources of a cluster. It also provides transparent VM migration features across geographically distributed datacenters, thanks to the adoption of the Service Switching paradigm. We also evaluate the effectiveness of the VM mapping procedures and compare our solution against other existing IaaS solutions.

Interconnection of geographically distributed wireless mesh testbeds: Resource sharing on a large scale

Creating large scale testbeds for evaluating wireless mesh technologies and protocols, and for testing their ability to support real world applications in realistic environments, is a crucial step towards the ultimate success of the WMN paradigm. In this paper we suggest the hierarchical federation of a planetary scale infrastructure, such as PlanetLab, with a number of local OMF-based wireless testbeds as a viable approach towards this goal. Along such direction, we present an architectural model for integrating at the technical level these two kinds of infrastructures and our initial implementation of such a model. We also present some test case experiments we run on our initial implementation of the integrated architecture, to illustrate how an experiment on peer-to-peer traffic optimization can be executed by combining both wireless nodes of a OMF-based testbed and PlanetLab nodes located across Europe. The possibility of running this kind of experiments in such a hybrid experimental scenario highlighted several real-world issues that are worth to be further investigated.