The emergency of machine type and ultra-reliable low latency communication is imposing stringent constraints for service provisioning. Addressing such constraints is challenging for network and cloud service providers. As a trending paradigm, software-defined networking (SDN) plays a significant role in future networks and services. However, the classical implementation of the SDN controller has limitations in-terms-of latency and reliability since the controller is decoupled from the forwarding device. Several research works have tried to tackle these challenges by proposing solutions such as Devoflow, DIFANE, and hierarchical and distributed controller deployment. Nonetheless, these approaches are not fully addressing these challenges. This paper tries to address the problem of latency and reliability by proposing a dynamic controller role delegation architecture for forwarding devices. To align with the microservice or multi-agent-based service-based architecture, the role delegation function as a service is proposed. The dynamic role delegation enables to predict and (pre-)installed flow rules in the forwarding devices based on various considerations such as network state, packet type, and service's stringent requirements. The proposed architecture is implemented and evaluated for latency and resiliency performance in comparison to the centralized and distributed deployment of the SDN controller. We used ComNetsEmu, a softwarized network emulation tool, to emulate SDN and NFV (Network Function Virtualization). The result indicated a significant decrease in latency and improved resilience in case of failure, yielding better network performance.
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On the feasibility of cloud-based SDN controllers for residential networks
Residential networks are home to increasingly diverse devices, including embedded devices that are part of the Internet of Things phenomenon, leading to new management and security challenges. However, current residential solutions that rely on customer premises equipment (CPE), which often remains deployed in homes for years without updates or maintenance, are not evolving to keep up with these emerging demands. Recently, researchers have proposed to outsource the tasks of managing and securing residential networks to cloud-based security services by leveraging software-defined networking (SDN). However, the use of cloud-based infrastructure may have performance implications. In this paper, we measure the performance impact and perception of a residential SDN using a cloud-based controller through two measurement studies. First, we recruit 270 residential users located across the United States to measure residential latency to cloud providers. Our measurements suggest the cloud controller architecture provides 90% of end-users with acceptable performance with judiciously selected public cloud locations. When evaluating web page loading times of popular domains, which are particularly latency-sensitive, we found an increase of a few seconds at the median. However, optimizations could reduce this overhead for top websites in practice.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1422180
- PAR ID:
- 10055774
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networks (NFV-SDN)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 6
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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