PhD defense of Giuseppe Di Lena

Giuseppe Di Lena

    • Title: “Distributed and Trustable SDN-NFV-enabled Network Emulation on Testbeds and Cloud infrastructures”
    • When: March 22, 2021 — 10:00
    • Where: online – (recorded and uploaded here)
    • Committee:
    • Abstract: In recent years, there have been multiple enhancements in virtualization tech-nologies, cloud computing, and network programmability. The emergence of concepts likeSoftware Defined Networking (SDN)andNetwork Function Vir-tualization (NFV) are changing the way the Internet Service Providers manage their services. In parallel, the last decade witnessed the rise of secure pub-lic cloud platforms like Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. These new con-cepts lead to cost reductions and fast innovation, driving the adoption of these paradigms by the industry. All these changes also bring new challenges. Net-works have become huge and complex while providing different kinds of services.Testing them is increasingly complicated and resource-intensive. To tackle this issue, we propose a new tool that combines emulation technologies and opti-mization techniques to distribute SDN/NFV experiments in private test-beds and public cloud platforms. Cloud providers, in general, deliver specific metrics to the users in terms of CPU and memory resources for the services they propose, but they tend to give a high-level overview for the network delay, without any specific value. This is a problem when deploying a delay-sensitive applica-tion in the cloud, since the users do not have any precise data about the delay. We propose a testing framework to monitor the network delay between multiple datacenters in the cloud infrastructures. Finally, in the context of SDN/NFVnetworks, we exploit the SDN centralized logic to implement an optimal routingstrategy in case of multiple link failures in the network. We also created a test-bed environment to validate our proposition in different network topologies.

    • Titre: “Emulation fiable et distribuée de réseaux virtualisés et programmables sur bancs de test et infrastructures Cloud”
    • Résumé: De nombreux progrès ont eu lieu ces dernières années dans les domaines de la virtualisation, l’informatique en nuage et la programmation des fonctions réseau. L’essor des concepts tels que Software Defined Networking (SDN) et Network Function Virtualization (NFV) a largement modifié la manière dont les fournisseurs de services Internet gèrent leurs offres. Parallèlement, au cours de la dernière décennie, les plateformes sécurisées de Cloud publiques telles que Amazon AWS ou Microsoft Azure sont devenues des acteurs incontournables de la scène. Ces nouveaux concepts permettent des réductions de coûts et une plus grande rapidité d’innovation, ce qui a conduit à l’adoption de ces paradigmes par l’industrie. Tous ces changements apportent également leur lot de nouveaux défis. Tout en étant devenus tentaculaires et complexes, ces réseaux offrent une plus grande diversité de services: les tester devient ainsi de plus en plus compliqué, tout en nécessitant
      beaucoup de ressources. Pour résoudre ce problème, nous proposons un nouvel outil qui combine les technologies d’émulation et les techniques d’optimisation afin de distribuer les simulations SDN/NFV dans des bancs de test privés et des plateformes de Cloud publiques. Par ailleurs, les fournisseurs de Cloud proposent en général aux utilisateurs des métriques spécifiques en termes de CPU et de ressources mémoire afin de caractériser leurs services, mais ont tendance à présenter une vue d’ensemble de haut niveau du délai maximum engendré par le réseau, sans aucune valeur spécifique. Ceci peut constituer un problème lorsqu’il s’agit de déployer des applications sensibles au délai dans le Cloud, car les utilisateurs n’ont pas de données précises sur ce sujet. Nous proposons un cadre de test pour surveiller le délai engendré par le réseau entre plusieurs centres de données des infrastructures Cloud. Enfin, dans le contexte des réseaux SDN/NFV, nous ex
      ploitons la logique centralisée SDN pour implémenter une stratégie optimale de routage en cas de défaillances multiples des liens dans le réseau. Un environnement de banc de test a également été créé afin de valider nos propositions pour différentes topologies de réseau.

HDR defense of Julien Bensmail

HDR Julien Bensmail

  • Title: A contribution to distinguishing labellings of graphs
  • When: December 15, 2020 — 09:00
  • Where: online with live streaming on Youtube
  • Committee:
  • Manuscript: http://jbensmai.fr/hdr/
  • Abstract: During the talk, I will present some of my contribution to distinguishing labellings of graphs, and the so-called 1-2-3 Conjecture that occupies an important place in this field. The general objective in this kind of problems is, given a (connected undirected) graph, to weight its edges in such a way that the adjacent vertices get distinguishable accordingly to some parameter computed from the edge-weighting. For instance, in the 1-2-3 Conjecture, raised by Karonski, Łuczak and Thomason in 2004, the aim is to weight the edges with 1,2,3 so that adjacent vertices get distinguished accordingly to their sums of incident weights.

    Although the 1-2-3 Conjecture was raised as nothing but a toy problem when it was introduced, several results in the recent years have established its deeper nature. The conjecture, by its very definition, has undoubtedly an algebraic nature. Some results have also established that it has some decompositional flavour. Although the conjecture is rather artificial, it is also related to other classical notions of graph theory, such as proper vertex-colourings of graphs.

    Through the results I will focus on during the talk, my main goal is to point out how deep this field is, and the many aspects of interest that are worth considering.

New team member: Małgorzata Sulkowska

Małgorzata Sulkowska

Welcome to our new team member: Małgorzata Sulkowska.

Małgorzata Sulkowska got her M.Sc. in Computer Science in 2007 from Wrocław University of Science and Technology (Poland). The thesis, written jointly with Michał Przykucki, won second award in the Polish Mathematical Society contest for the best M.Sc. thesis in probability theory and applied mathematics. Małgorzata got her Ph.D. in Mathematics in 2013 from Wrocław University of Science and Technology under the supervision of prof. Michał Morayne. She got the assistant position at the same university already in 2012 and since 2014 she is an assistant professor in the Department of Fundamentals of Computer Science. In years 2015-2016 she spent 5-months as a postdoc at Federal University of Ceara (Fortaleza, Brazil) under the supervision of prof. Fabricio Siqueira Benevides. In years 2016-2020 she conducted a series of shorter research visits, among others, at University of London (Great Britain), Vienna University of Technology (Austria), University of Louisville (USA) and Inria Sophia-Antipolis (France). Since 2018 she has been a mentor of the Student Research Group Solvro at Wrocław University of Science and Technology. In 2019 Małgorzata was awarded a Miniatura3 grant from Polish National Science Center for research on stopping algorithms for graphs. In September 2020 she started a one-year postdoc position at Universite Cote d’Azur as a member of COATI team at INRIA Sophia-Antipolis. Her main research interests are optimal stopping problems, lying on the crossroads of graph theory, combinatorics and probability theory.

New team member: Ramon Aparicio-Pardo

Ramon Aparicio-Pardo

Welcome to our new team member: Ramon Aparicio-Pardo.

Ramon Aparicio-Pardo received a MEng in Telecom. and a Ph.D. from Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena (UPCT), Spain, in 2006 and 2011, respectively. His Ph.D. thesis, titled ‘Optimization and Planning of WDM Transparent Optical Networks,’ was distinguished with TELEFÓNICA Award for Best Thesis in Networking.
After two postdocs, at Orange Labs on optical switching networks (2012-2013) and at IRISA, in former IMT-Telecom Bretagne, on adaptive streaming (2013-2015), he joined Université Côte d’Azur (UCA) as an associate professor (“maître de conférences”) in Sept. 2015 and became a member of the SigNet group of the I3S laboratory. His main research interest is the optimal design and management of communication networks.

In September 2020, he joined obtained a “délégation Inria” to work with COATI on the design of AI-based methods for network optimization.

Links to online seminars

Several websites are currently collecting online talks. You can find a list of some of them below.

You can also have a look to formerly recorded seminars