FEDNET 2012 - Workshop on Algorithms and Operating Procedures for Federated Virtualized Networks (FEDNET)

FEDNET - Algorithms and Operating Procedures for Federated Virtualized Networks

Introduction:

Users will view the Future Internet (FI) as an efficient network of applications, functions and contents. Moreover, users and network operators look anticipate from the FI to be the major convergence platform for today’s telecommunications services and tomorrow’s applications. They expect that the converged system, among others, will provide seamless applications across different technical and administrative domains and achieve performance values, e.g. for speed and reliability, which haven’t yet been accomplished. The users will not care about the whereabouts of services; currently they are viewed as parts of “the cloud”, and it’s completely up to the operators to orchestrate the system behind the user interface such that good Quality of Experience is achieved.

Although the converged systems should appear transparent from the viewpoint of the future applications, the FI is also expected to provide diversity, e.g. for enabling new business models. For example, the FI should comprise mechanisms that empower users to select the cheapest provider in a dynamic way. In addition, operators hope to be enabled by the FI technologies to differentiate themselves from other operators and thus attracting new customers, however not necessarily end-users.

As a result, the FI is expected to reveal architecture features such polymorphic, or being virtualized or being federated. Application-specific networks are required to reduce the system complexity for a seamless service operation and achieving the desired performance values. New business models might be facilitated by mechanisms for dynamically selecting networks or network resources.

Currently, two major concepts emerge for implementation of the above outlined features for of the architecture of the FI: a) Network Virtualization (NV) and b) Network Federation (NF). Hereby, NV enables the parallel operation (respectively consolidation) of multiple and possibly application specific network in a single physical system, and thus achieving vertical integration. NF aims at the combination, also denoted as stitching, of willingly cooperating network resources and thus achieving horizontal convergence of diverse technical or administrative domains. Due to these features, NV and NF are currently investigated in almost all major FI projects such as GENI, AKARI, OneLab2 or G-Lab as the core technologies.

However, the operation of NV and NF based networks might become challenging. The support of multi-domain federated networks in virtual environments requires scalable management of network nodes and resources, which may exhibit a strong dynamic behavior. Future NV and NF based networks form constantly changing transport system in contrast to today’s rather static network. In this sense, a new paradigm for network management of NV and NF is required, where a distributed ‘In-Network Management’ may be envisaged.

The aim of the FEDNET workshop on “Algorithms and Operating Procedures for Federated Virtualized Networks” is to bring together scientists and engineers from academia and industry and from various disciplines to exchange and discuss their ideas, views and research results towards the management and operation of consolidated, converged, virtualized and federated Future Internet and networks of the future.

Topics of particular interest:

Infrastructure as a Service, IaaS
Network as a Service, NaaS
Virtualization Technologies
Network and Cloud Virtualization
Virtualized Resources Discovery Mechanisms
Combination of Virtual Resources
Mechanisms and protocols for Network Virtualization (NV)
Performance, scalability and reliability of NV mechanisms
Mechanisms and protocols for Network Federation (NF)
Performance, scalability and reliability of NF mechanisms
Mechanisms and protocols for providing Cloud services
Mechanisms and methods for the operation of IaaS, NaaS, and Cloud services
Combined Control (network and cloud resource)
Cloud Service QoS / QoE
Measurements in Virtualized Environments and Clouds
Performance Modeling
Transparency and Isolation
Control Plane
Management of Virtualized Resources
User-Cloud Connectivity
Inter-Cloud Connectivity
Inter-Data Center Connectivity