Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are the key components of the emerging Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm. They are now ubiquitous and used in a plurality of application domains. WSNs are still domain ...specific and usually deployed to support a specific application. However, as WSNs' nodes are becoming more and more powerful, it is getting more and more pertinent to research how multiple applications could share a very same WSN infrastructure. Virtualization is a technology that can potentially enable this sharing. This paper is a survey on WSN virtualization. It provides a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art and an in-depth discussion of the research issues. We introduce the basics of WSN virtualization and motivate its pertinence with carefully selected scenarios. Existing works are presented in detail and critically evaluated using a set of requirements derived from the scenarios. The pertinent research projects are also reviewed. Several research issues are also discussed with hints on how they could be tackled.
The ongoing network softwarization trend holds the promise to revolutionize network infrastructures by making them more flexible, reconfigurable, portable, and more adaptive than ever. Still, the ...migration from hard-coded/hard-wired network functions toward their software-programmable counterparts comes along with the need for tailored optimizations and acceleration techniques so as to avoid or at least mitigate the throughput/latency performance degradation with respect to fixed function network elements. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we provide a comprehensive overview of the host-based network function virtualization (NFV) ecosystem, covering a broad range of techniques, from low-level hardware acceleration and bump-in-the-wire offloading approaches to high-level software acceleration solutions, including the virtualization technique itself. Second, we derive guidelines regarding the design, development, and operation of NFV-based deployments that meet the flexibility and scalability requirements of modern communication networks.
Communication networks need to be both adaptive and scalable. The last few years have seen an explosive growth of software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) to ...address this need. Both technologies help enable networking software to be decoupled from the hardware so that software functionality is no longer constrained by the underlying hardware and can evolve independently. Both SDN and NFV aim to advance a software-based approach to networking, where networking functionality is implemented in software modules and executed on a suitable cloud computing platform. Achieving this goal requires the virtualization paradigm used in these services that play an important role in the transition to software-based networks. Consequently, the corresponding computing platforms accompanying the virtualization technologies need to provide the required agility, robustness, and scalability for the services executed. Serverless computing has recently emerged as a new paradigm in virtualization and has already significantly changed the economics of offloading computations to the cloud. It is considered as a low-latency, resource-efficient, and rapidly deployable alternative to traditional virtualization approaches, such as those based on virtual machines and containers. Serverless computing provides scalability and cost reduction, without requiring any additional configuration overhead on the part of the developer. In this paper, we explore and survey how serverless computing technology can help building adaptive and scalable networks and show the potential pitfalls of doing so.
In this tutorial paper, we look into the evolution and prospect of network architecture and propose a novel conceptual architecture for the 6th generation (6G) networks. The proposed architecture has ...two key elements, i.e., holistic network virtualization and pervasive artificial intelligence (AI). The holistic network virtualization consists of network slicing and digital twin, from the aspects of service provision and service demand, respectively, to incorporate service-centric and user-centric networking. The pervasive network intelligence integrates AI into future networks from the perspectives of networking for AI and AI for networking, respectively. Building on holistic network virtualization and pervasive network intelligence, the proposed architecture can facilitate three types of interplay, i.e., the interplay between digital twin and network slicing paradigms, between model-driven and data-driven methods for network management, and between virtualization and AI, to maximize the flexibility, scalability, adaptivity, and intelligence for 6G networks. We also identify challenges and open issues related to the proposed architecture. By providing our vision, we aim to inspire further discussions and developments on the potential architecture of 6G.
In General-Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Unit (GPGPU), the use of CPUs is combined with that of GPUs. CPUs are used for sequential code, while GPUs are used for parallel code. GPGPU has ...been enabled by two key factors: (i) the massively parallel architecture of GPUs, which allows thousands of single cores to run parallel code; and (ii) the development of platforms, such as CUDA, that simplify implementing code for GPUs. GPGPU has established itself as the standard computing system in most computing fields due to the great improvements it brings. However, its use is not without problems, such as GPU underutilization, high cost, power consumption, etc. In this paper we present NGS (Network GPGPU System) to address the underutilization of GPUs in computing centers. NGS orchestrates the concurrent access to GPGPU resources from different nodes of the cluster by leveraging the remote GPU virtualization mechanism and the NVML library by NVIDIA. In this way, NGS enables different nodes of the cluster to access remote GPUs as if they were local at the same time that this access is guaranteed to be carried out without collisions. The main novelty is that NGS offers a global and standard solution independent of the computing environment used. Experimental results show up to 4x improvements compared to popular approaches.
Diverse proprietary network appliances increase both the capital and operational expense of service providers, meanwhile causing problems of network ossification. Network function virtualization ...(NFV) is proposed to address these issues by implementing network functions as pure software on commodity and general hardware. NFV allows flexible provisioning, deployment, and centralized management of virtual network functions. Integrated with SDN, the software-defined NFV architecture further offers agile traffic steering and joint optimization of network functions and resources. This architecture benefits a wide range of applications (e.g., service chaining) and is becoming the dominant form of NFV. In this survey, we present a thorough investigation of the development of NFV under the software-defined NFV architecture, with an emphasis on service chaining as its application. We first introduce the software-defined NFV architecture as the state of the art of NFV and present relationships between NFV and SDN. Then, we provide a historic view of the involvement from middlebox to NFV. Finally, we introduce significant challenges and relevant solutions of NFV, and discuss its future research directions by different application domains.
Multi-access edge computing (MEC) is an emerging ecosystem, which aims at converging telecommunication and IT services, providing a cloud computing platform at the edge of the radio access network. ...MEC offers storage and computational resources at the edge, reducing latency for mobile end users and utilizing more efficiently the mobile backhaul and core networks. This paper introduces a survey on MEC and focuses on the fundamental key enabling technologies. It elaborates MEC orchestration considering both individual services and a network of MEC platforms supporting mobility, bringing light into the different orchestration deployment options. In addition, this paper analyzes the MEC reference architecture and main deployment scenarios, which offer multitenancy support for application developers, content providers, and third parties. Finally, this paper overviews the current standardization activities and elaborates further on open research challenges.
Software-Defined Networking: A Comprehensive Survey Kreutz, Diego; Ramos, Fernando M. V.; Verissimo, Paulo Esteves ...
Proceedings of the IEEE,
2015-Jan., 2015-1-00, 20150101, Letnik:
103, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The Internet has led to the creation of a digital society, where (almost) everything is connected and is accessible from anywhere. However, despite their widespread adoption, traditional IP networks ...are complex and very hard to manage. It is both difficult to configure the network according to predefined policies, and to reconfigure it to respond to faults, load, and changes. To make matters even more difficult, current networks are also vertically integrated: the control and data planes are bundled together. Software-defined networking (SDN) is an emerging paradigm that promises to change this state of affairs, by breaking vertical integration, separating the network's control logic from the underlying routers and switches, promoting (logical) centralization of network control, and introducing the ability to program the network. The separation of concerns, introduced between the definition of network policies, their implementation in switching hardware, and the forwarding of traffic, is key to the desired flexibility: by breaking the network control problem into tractable pieces, SDN makes it easier to create and introduce new abstractions in networking, simplifying network management and facilitating network evolution. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on SDN. We start by introducing the motivation for SDN, explain its main concepts and how it differs from traditional networking, its roots, and the standardization activities regarding this novel paradigm. Next, we present the key building blocks of an SDN infrastructure using a bottom-up, layered approach. We provide an in-depth analysis of the hardware infrastructure, southbound and northbound application programming interfaces (APIs), network virtualization layers, network operating systems (SDN controllers), network programming languages, and network applications. We also look at cross-layer problems such as debugging and troubleshooting. In an effort to anticipate the future evolution of this new paradigm, we discuss the main ongoing research efforts and challenges of SDN. In particular, we address the design of switches and control platforms - with a focus on aspects such as resiliency, scalability, performance, security, and dependability - as well as new opportunities for carrier transport networks and cloud providers. Last but not least, we analyze the position of SDN as a key enabler of a software-defined environment.
With the advent of Internet of Things (IoT) connecting billions of mobile and stationary devices to serve real-time applications, cloud computing paradigms face some significant challenges such as ...high latency and jitter, non-supportive location-awareness and mobility, and non-adaptive communication types. To address these challenges, edge computing paradigms, namely Fog Computing (FC), Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) and Cloudlet, have emerged to shift the digital services from centralized cloud computing to computing at edges. In this article, we analyze cloud and edge computing paradigms from features and pillars perspectives to identify the key motivators of the transitions from one type of virtualized computing paradigm to another one. We then focus on computing and network virtualization techniques as the essence of all these paradigms, and delineate why virtualization features, resource richness and application requirements are the primary factors for the selection of virtualization types in IoT frameworks. Based on these features, we compare the state-of-the-art research studies in the IoT domain. We finally investigate the deployment of virtualized computing and networking resources from performance perspective in an edge-cloud environment, followed by mapping of the existing work to the provided taxonomy for this research domain. The lessons from the reviewed are that the selection of virtualization technique, placement and migration of virtualized resources rely on the requirements of IoT services (i.e., latency, scalability, mobility, multi-tenancy, privacy, and security). As a result, there is a need for prioritizing the requirements, integrating different virtualization techniques, and exploiting a hierarchical edge-cloud architecture.
•Investigating features of cloud and edge computing paradigms•Investigating the virtualization of computing and networking resources in the edge computing•Mapping the state-of-the-art studies to the provided taxonomies for virtualized resources from performance perspective.
Network functions virtualization (NFV), along with software-defined networking (SDN), drives a new change in networking infrastructure with respect to designing, deploying, and managing various ...network services. In particular, NFV has potential to significantly reduce the hardware cost, greatly improve operational efficiency, and dramatically shorten the development lifecycle of network service. It also makes network functions and services much more adaptive and scalable. Despite the promising advantages of NFV, security remains to be one of the vital concerns and potential hurdle, as attack surface becomes unclear and defense line turns to be blurred in the virtualization environment. This survey is therefore devoted to analyzing NFV from a security perspective. We first analyze security threats of five well-defined NFV use cases, with an objective to establishing a comprehensive layer-specific threat taxonomy. Second, we conduct in-depth comparative studies on several security mechanisms that are applied in traditional scenarios and in NFV environments. The purpose is to analyze their implicit relationships with NFV performance objectives in terms of feasibility, agility, effectiveness, and so on. Third, based on the established threat taxonomy and the analyzed security mechanisms, we provide a set of recommendations on securing NFV based services, along with the analysis on the state-of-the-art security countermeasures. A resulting holistic security framework is intended to lay a foundation for NFV service providers to deploy adaptive, scalable, and cost-effective security hardening based on their particular needs. Some future research directions are finally discussed.
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