Challenges to support edge-as-a-service (original) (raw)

Software Defined Management of Edge as a Service Networks

It is a consensus that the Internet suffers from architectural limitations, including resilience, scalability, and manageability, among others. Therefore, companies access the Internet by establishing a Service Level Agreement (SLA), in the attempt to ensure Quality of Service (QoS) for users. To address the current limitations of the Internet, researchers have recently proposed the Edge as a Service (EaaS) paradigm as a suitable solution to improve the access capacity of edge networks. EaaS uses Network Virtualization and Software Defined Networks to expand flexibility and manageability of access to edge network resources. Moreover, to maintain QoS assurance for users, EaaS addresses network events (such as traffic overload, failures, etc.) that can potentially affect QoS. Within this context, this article proposes a Software Defined Management of EaaS environment, called SDM-EaaS. The proposal enhances the QoS for the end user, while improving the utilization of network resources in dynamic scenarios allowing for unpredictable changes in traffic demands, network infrastructure availability and customer characteristics. Experiments based on emulation as well as real testbed demonstrate the effectiveness of the SDM-EaaS strategy.

Toward dynamic virtualized network services in telecom operator networks

Computer Networks, 2015

NFV and SDN are nowadays seen as a solid opportunity by telecom operators to reduce costs while at the same time providing new and better services. Recently, the Unify project proposed a multi-layered architecture that, leveraging different levels of abstraction, can orchestrate and deploy generic network services on the physical infrastructure of the telecom operator. In this paper, we exploit such an architecture to deliver end-to-end generic services in presence of multiple concurring players (e.g. network operator, end-users), leveraging a new simple data model. Particularly, we propose a description-based approach allowing to deploy agile, implementation-independent and high-level network services over a distributed set of resources. The resulting data model can abstract generic services, including both middlebox-based (e.g., firewalls, NATs, etc.) and traditional LAN-based ones (e.g., a bittorrent client). Finally, two distinct prototypes, originated by different design principles, are implemented in order to validate our proposal with the aim of demonstrating the adaptability of our approach to different contexts.

An Intermediary Software Infrastructure for Edge Services

2005

We describe the goals and architecture of a new framework that aims at facilitating the deployment of adaptation services running on intermediate edge servers. The main goal is to guarantee robustness and quick prototyping of functions that should integrate mobile/fixed-network services. Moreover, we intend to design a distributed architecture with the purpose of guaranteeing efficient delivery.

Edge-as-a-Service: Towards Distributed Cloud Architectures

2017

We present an Edge-as-a-Service (EaaS) platform for realising distributed cloud architectures and integrating the edge of the network in the computing ecosystem. The EaaS platform is underpinned by (i) a lightweight discovery protocol that identifies edge nodes and make them publicly accessible in a computing environment, and (ii) a scalable resource provisioning mechanism for offloading workloads from the cloud on to the edge for servicing multiple user requests. We validate the feasibility of EaaS on an online game use-case to highlight the improvement in the QoS of the application hosted on our cloud-edge platform. On this platform we demonstrate (i) low overheads of less than 6%, (ii) reduced data traffic to the cloud by up to 95% and (iii) minimised application latency between 40%-60%.

Network as a service: A new vista of opportunities

IEEE Potentials, 2022

The networking industry, compared to the compute industry, has been slow in evolving from a closed ecosystem with limited abstractions to a more open ecosystem with welldefined sophisticated high level abstractions. This has resulted in an ossified Internet architecture that inhibits innovation and is unnecessarily complex. Fortunately, there has been an exciting flux of rapid developments in networking in recent times with prominent trends emerging that have brought us to the cusp of a major paradigm shift. In particular, the emergence of technologies such as cloud computing, software defined networking (SDN), and network virtualization are driving a new vision of 'networking as a service' (NaaS) in which networks are managed flexibly and efficiently cloud computing style. These technologies promise to both facilitate architectural and technological innovation while also simplifying commissioning, orchestration, and composition of network services. In this article, we introduce our readers to these technologies. In the coming few years, the trends of cloud computing, SDN, and network virtualization will further strengthen each other's value proposition symbiotically and NaaS will increasingly become the dominant mode of commissioning new networks.

Edge-based differentiated services

Quality of Service–IWQoS 2005, 2005

Network quality of service is traditionally thought to be provided by a combination of scheduling in the network nodes to enforce a capacity sharing policy and traffic controls to prevent congestion that could annihilate that policy. The work presented herein is instead ...

T-NOVA: A marketplace for virtualized network functions

2014 European Conference on Networks and Communications (EuCNC), 2014

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is a concept, which has attracted significant attention as a promising approach towards the virtualization/ "softwarisation" of network infrastructures. With the aim of promoting NFV, this paper outlines an integrated architecture, designed and developed within the context of the EU FP7 T-NOVA project, which allows network operators not only to deploy virtualized Network Functions (NFs) for their own needs, but also to offer them to their customers, as value-added services (Network Functions asa-Service, NFaaS). Virtual network appliances (gateways, proxies, firewalls, transcoders, analyzers etc.) can be provided on-demand as-a-Service, eliminating the need to acquire, install and maintain specialized hardware at customers' premises. A "NFV Marketplace" is also introduced, where network services and functions created by a variety of developers can be published, acquired and instantiated on-demand.

The fluid internet: service-centric management of a virtualized future internet

IEEE Communications Magazine, 2000

The Internet was originally designed as a besteffort packet forwarding substrate. However, since its inception, its purpose has shifted towards a rich, service-centric delivery platform. Its underlying infrastructure, as well as the number of connected devices, have taken immense proportions, and sharing of capabilities has come into widespread use. Moreover, the Internet's services are becoming increasingly interactive, contextaware, and content-oriented. This has lead to stringent delivery requirements being imposed on the underlying infrastructure. Despite these evolutions, management of the Internet has not evolved significantly. It remains largely static and is unable to provide dynamic end-to-end service delivery guarantees in a cost effective manner. In this article, we propose the Fluid Internet, a novel paradigm aimed at tackling these management challenges. The Fluid Internet seamlessly provisions virtualized infrastructure capabilities, adapting the delivery substrate to the dynamic requirements of services and users, much like a fluid adapting to fit its surroundings. As such, the Fluid Internet gives a service provider the ability to manage its services end-toend and elastically. Our vision is achieved through a unification of concepts from network virtualization, cloud computing, and service-centric networking. The relevant stakeholders, as well as their functions and interactions are described. Additionally, we identify the major technical challenges that remain to be tackled for the Fluid Internet vision to become a reality.