Virtual Middleboxes Research Articles

Joint virtual middlebox and application placement with bandwidth guarantees in multi-tenant datacenter

Hardware middleboxes are widely used in datacenter to provide network functions such as firewalls, intrusion detection system, load balancers, etc. Unfortunately, the hardware middleboxes are unable to offer customized functions for individual tenant. To this end, the software middleboxes have been introduced in datacenter which provide flexible network functions for customers. The arrival traffic of one tenant is first distributed to the pre-allocated software middleboxes chain and then delivered to the application servers of the tenant. With regard to the complicated communication of intra-middleboxs, middleboxes-to-applications and intra-applications traffics, we propose vMAP, a joint middlebox and application placement algorithm to effectively use the limited bandwidth inside datacenter. vMAP leverages the communication model of tenant’s requirement for both middlebox and application and provides an effective virtual machines (VMs) placement algorithm to minimize the bandwidth consumption inside datacenters. vMAP further addresses the middlebox scaling problem by reserving few free VMs resource based on a probability model of the variable workload. Extensive simulations on current large-scale datacenter network topologies verify that vMAP can accept more tenant requests than prior placement algorithm (e.g., Stratos (Gember et al. in Stratos: Virtual middleboxes as first-class entities, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, 2012) ) while saving $$\sim$$10% core-level bandwidth.

Gradual Switch Clustering Based Virtual Middlebox Placement for Improving Service Chain Performance

Gradual Switch Clustering Based Virtual Middlebox Placement for Improving Service Chain Performance

Unified Programmability of Virtualized Network Functions and Software-Defined Wireless Networks

The quickly growing demand for wireless networks and the numerous application-specific requirements stand in stark contrast to today’s inflexible management and operation of wireless networks. While most research focuses on mobile networks, WiFi is often left out of the purview. In this paper, we present and evaluate OpenSDWN, a novel WiFi architecture based on a joint software-defined network and network functions virtualization approach. OpenSDWN exploits virtualization across the wired and wireless network and introduces datapath programmability to enable service differentiation and fine-grained transmission control, facilitating the prioritization of critical applications. OpenSDWN implements per-client virtual access points and per-client virtual middleboxes, to render network functions more flexible and support mobility and seamless migration. Moreover, OpenSDWN also increases the security of upcoming WiFi HotSpot architectures by following a functional split approach. Finally, OpenSDWN can also be used to out-source the control over the home network to a participatory interface or to an Internet service provider.

An Optimized Deployment Mechanism for Virtual Middleboxes in NFV- and SDN-Enabling Network

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) are recently considered as very promising drivers of the evolution of existing middlebox services, which play intrinsic and fundamental roles in today’s networks. To address the virtual service deployment issues that caused by introducing NFV or SDN to networks, this paper proposes an optimal solution by combining quantum genetic algorithm with cooperative game theory. Specifically, we first state the concrete content of the service deployment problem and describe the system framework based on the architecture of SDN. Second, for the service location placement sub-problem, an integer linear programming model is built, which aims at minimizing the network transport delay by selecting suitable service locations, and then a heuristic solution is designed based on the improved quantum genetic algorithm. Third, for the service amount placement sub-problem, we apply the rigorous cooperative game-theoretic approach to build the mathematical model, and implement a distributed algorithm corresponding to Nash bargaining solution. Finally, experimental results show that our proposed method can calculate automatically the optimized placement locations, which reduces 30% of the average traffic delay compared to that of the random placement scheme. Meanwhile, the service amount placement approach can achieve the performance that the average metric values of satisfaction degree and fairness index reach above 90%. And evaluation results demonstrate that our proposed mechanism has a comprehensive advantage for network application.

Programming the Home and Enterprise WiFi with OpenSDWN

The quickly growing demand for wireless networks and the numerous application-specific requirements stand in stark contrast to today's inflexible management and operation of WiFi networks. In this paper, we present and evaluate OpenSDWN, a novel WiFi architecture based on an SDN/NFV approach. OpenSDWN exploits datapath programmability to enable service differentiation and fine-grained transmission control, facilitating the prioritization of critical applications. OpenSDWN implements per-client virtual access points and per-client virtual middleboxes, to render network functions more flexible and support mobility and seamless migration. OpenSDWN can also be used to out-source the control over the home network to a participatory interface or to an Internet Service Provider.

NetSecCC: A scalable and fault-tolerant architecture for cloud computing security

How to ensure network security for modern virtual machine based cloud computing platforms is still an open question. This question becomes more important and urgent to solve, as the fast development of cloud computing in recent years. Though there are many existing solutions, they either provide incomplete protection or neglect important intrinsic characteristics in cloud computing. In this paper, we introduce a novel network security architecture for cloud computing (NetSecCC) considering characteristics of cloud computing. Specifically, it 1) provides protection to both external and interne traffics in cloud computing, 2) attains flexible scalability with respect to virtual middlebox load, and 3) achieves fault-tolerant among virtual middlebox failure. Experiments and simulations on our proof-of-concept prototype of NetSecCC validate that NetSecCC is an effective architecture with minimal performance overhead, and that it can be applied to extensive practical promotion in cloud computing.