Context
Communication networks are going through a transformation known as network softwarization which is changing the landscape of network operations and management. Network softwarization refers to the general practice of decoupling network processing and control software from specialized hardware. Two major driving forces of softwarization are Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). They are enabling the network operators to replace purpose-built hardware with commodity hardware and leverage open APIs to control and provision the network infrastructure in a programmatic way.
On one hand, SDN proposes to decouple the control plane from network devices and implement it as a logically centralized software controller running on a single or cluster of servers. An SDN controller has a global view of the network and can make traffic management decisions based on operator defined policies. On the other hand, NFV proposes to run network functions (NFs) such as firewalls, load balancers, intrusion detection systems, etc. on commodity servers as virtual network functions (VNFs) instead of the traditional model of deploying NFs using purpose-built and vertically integrated hardware middleboxes.
Objectives
The research focus of the proposed associate team is on network monitoring and service orchestration for softwarized networks.
- Network monitoring is fundamental to network management. Network softwarization
is creating opportunities for developing more effective monitoring solutions. For instance, the global network view available to SDN controllers facilitates the development of network monitoring applications that optimize monitoring frequencies and the placement of monitoring probes. In order to exploit the full potential of network softwarization, the way network infrastructures are monitored need to be revisited in order to provide: (i) probe customization to support a wide range of applications’ monitoring requirements; (ii) efficient algorithms for collecting diverse network data with minimal overhead; (iii) efficient storage of and analytics on large volumes of monitored data. - For service orchestration, we plan to re-architect VNFs using a microservice software architecture. NFV allows the consolidation of multiple NFs on the same physical hardware. However, many packet processing tasks are common across VNFs such as packet parsing, encryption, decryption, payload inspection, etc. This leads to unnecessary processing overhead for executing these redundant functionalities when VNFs are chained to realize network services.
