Resilient controller and hypervisor placement for future communication networks (RESyST)

 

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On 26 October 2018 workshop "Optical 5G Transport Networks - How to Face Reliability with Virtualization?" was held at the 2018 Asia Communications and Photonics Conference (ACP 2018). Moderated by the project co-leader, Marija Furdek Prekratić, this workshop presented challenges in designing and implementing reliable 5G communication networks, with the focus on virtualization of the underlying optical transport networks. The workshop included presentations by experts from industry and academia, who outlined their views on dealing with the related resilience issues:

Jörg-Peter Elbers, ADVA (Germany)
Robert Keys, Juniper (Canada)
Dan Kilper, University of Arizona (USA)
Wei Lu, University of Science and Technology of China (China)
Marco Ruffini, Trinity College Dublin (Ireland)
Sameer Sharma, Nokia Bell Labs (USA)
Gangxiang Shen, Soochow University (China)

After their presentations, the experts discussed on open questions with audience, which involved scientists and other professionals from industry, university professors, postdoctoral and doctoral researchers.

Author: Ognjen Dobrijević

A scientific paper is accepted for presentation at the 4th IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networks (IEEE NFV-SDN 2018) and for publication in the accompanying proceedings. The title of this paper is "Placement for SDN Control Plane with Network Hypervisors: Protecting Control Paths" and it presents results from the project activities on definition of the controller and network hypervisor placement problem for a resilient SDN control plane. More specifically, the paper describes details on the problem definition and modelling, the respective mathematical formulation, a software implementation of the model, and preliminary results of its evaluation.

Author: Ognjen Dobrijević

RNDM 2018 - 10th International Workshop on Resilient Networks Design and Modeling was held in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, Norway from 27 to 29 August 2018. This anually-held scientific workshop gathers participants from academia and industry which work on various research topics in the areas of network reliability, survivability and resilience. Program was organized into plenary session, 8 technical sessions and invited talks session. The total of 39 participants attended presentations of 6 invited papers, 10 full papers and 7 short papers.

The project leader, Ognjen Dobrijević, presented the scientific paper entitled "Another Price to Pay: An Availability Analysis for SDN Virtualization with Network Hypervisors", which is co-authored by all RESyST team members. This paper describes results on evaluating criticality of controllers and network hypervisors in a distributed SDN control plane with respect to different types of failures. One of the presentation goals was also to promote the RESyST research activities. All the RNDM papers are published in the accompanying workshop proceedings (ISBN identifier: 978-1-5386-7029-3).

Author: Ognjen Dobrijević

The project co-leader, Marija Furdek Prekratić, and the project leader, Ognjen Dobrijević, will organize a workshop entitled "Optical 5G Transport Networks - How to Face Reliability with Virtualization?" at the 2018 Asia Communications and Photonics Conference (ACP 2018). ACP is one of the largest international conferences in the Asia-Pacific region on communications, in particular on optical communication, and has been organized annually from 2001. This workshop would provide a venue to discuss the reliability challenges for 5G communication networks, with a special focus on optical infrastructure and the issues stemming from network virtualization. The workshop would gather experts from both academia and industry to describe their visions on how to deal with these challenges.

Ognjen has also been invited to give a research talk at the same conference and present the respective paper entitled "On design of reliable SDN networks with virtualization capabilities".

Author: Ognjen Dobrijević

Two scientific papers were submitted for possible presentation at the 4th IEEE Conference on Network Functions Virtualization and Software Defined Networks (IEEE NFV-SDN 2018) and publication in the associated conference proceedings.

First paper presents results from the project activities on the SDN controller and network hypervisor placement problem for a resilient SDN control plane. In particular, this paper describes specifics of the problem modelling, the accompanying mathematical formulation, its software implementation and an initial evaluation. Second paper outlines current implementation of the RESyST laboratory prototype and a demo of its operation. The implementation allows to deploy a distributed SDN control plane, i.e., software platforms of controllers and network hypervisors on top of the data plane infrastructure, while also providing protection for the SDN control communication. This prototype takes advantage of the research equipment that has been acquired in the scope of this project.

Author: Ognjen Dobrijević

After the ONDM 2018 conference, a scientific paper is accepted for presentation at the 10th International Workshop on Resilient Networks Design and Modeling (RNDM 2018) and for publication in the accompanying proceedings. The title of this paper is "Another Price to Pay: An Availability Analysis for SDN Virtualization with Network Hypervisors" and it is co-authored by all RESyST team members. The paper presents results from the project activities on evaluating criticality of controllers and network hypervisors from an SDN-based control plane in light of possible failures, investigating different protection strategies for such a control plane, as well as analyzing gains and cost of the examined protection strategies in terms of, e.g., control plane availability and control communication latency.

Author: Ognjen Dobrijević
State-of-the-art research equipment...

One of the key project goals is to improve research infrastructure at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (FEEC) in the domain of 5G communication networks, most notably by acquiring state-of-the-art equipment. In the scope of this project, six network devices which support the software-defined networking (SDN) mode of operation have been purchased. These devices are interconnected and configured so as to form a fat-tree-like topology that is common for data center networks. Data centers will be a basis for implementing 5G networks and realizing the respective communication services.

A virtualization server has also been procured and installed. It will allow flexibility in setting up a distributed SDN-based control plane of different complexity and protection configuration, thus facilitating planned experimental evaluation and validation of the RESyST resilience strategies in a laboratory prototype of 5G-envisioned network control and the underlying infrastructure. Furthermore, the acquired equipment will reinforce research & innovation capacity at FEEC to the benefit of all its employees, which is a strategic goal for development of FEEC.

Author: Ognjen Dobrijević

On 17 May 2018 the project leader, Ognjen Dobrijević, gave a public presentation at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (FEEC) on project's research domain and specified objectives, as well as on its current scientific results and ongoing efforts. This talk, entitled "Virtualization of software-defined networks: what is the price to pay?", outlined main concepts behind software-defined networking (SDN) and network virtualization with SDN hypervisors, discussed various types of network virtualization cost/overhead that are introduced by the hypervisors, and presented the means of protecting SDN-based networks from failures, which consider these cost/overhead aspects. The talk was organized under umbrella of the IEEE Croatia Section and attended by experts from industry, as well as by the FEEC professors, postdoctoral and doctoral researchers, and master-level students. 

Author: Ognjen Dobrijević

The project leader, assistant professor Ognjen Dobrijević, visited KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm from 2 January to 31 March 2018 for the purposes of scientific research, professional training and project work. His visit to KTH was supported in full by the RESyST project grant. The visit involved joint scientific and research activities with members of the Optical Networks Lab in regard to criticality of the SDN control plane that supports network virtualization, design of protection strategies for the control plane that consider various failure types, reliability and availability analysis, and modeling of the placement problem for the control plane that may employ different protection strategies. Ognjen Dobrijević also held informal meetings with colleagues from other research institutes and industry, most notably RISE Acreo and Ericsson AB, so as to raise the project visibility.

One of the direct outcomes from his visit to KTH is the first scientific paper co-authored by all the team members, which presents results from the project activities on protecting the virtualization-centric SDN control plane from different types of failures as well as analyzing benefits and cost of the considered protection strategies. This paper was submitted to the 10th International Workshop on Resilient Networks Design and Modeling (RNDM 2018).

Author: Ognjen Dobrijević
Public project presentation at KTH,...

The project leader, assistant professor Ognjen Dobrijević, is visiting KTH - Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm for the purposes of scientific research, professional training and project work. On 31 January 2018 he gave a public presentation on project's research objectives, planned activities and current results to members of the Optical Networks Lab and other researchers from the Communication Systems department. The goal of this presentation was to raise the project visibility and spur interest in the respective area of research.

Author: Ognjen Dobrijević
The project co-leader, dr. Marija...

The project co-leader, dr. Marija Furdek, visited the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing from 20 December to 22 December 2017. This visit focused on project activities with respect to the identified use cases for a virtualized 5G network and the criticality of SDN-based control plane for the network operation. Furthermore, dr. Furdek gave an invited lecture under umbrella of the IEEE Croatia Section on challenges of making optical data center networks programmable and more resilient to failures.

Author: Ognjen Dobrijević
Meeting with prof. Aleksić on...

Professor Slaviša Aleksić visited the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing from 11 December to 13 December 2017 in the scope of the Erasmus+ mobility programme. This visit was used as an opportunity for the RESyST project leader, Ognjen Dobrijević, to present project activities and the planned research goals. Several areas for potential future collaboration and joint proposals have been identified, including different use cases for 5G communication networks.

Author: Ognjen Dobrijević