Private 5G networks will soon be ubiquitous across the future-generation smart wireless access infrastructures hosting a wide range of performance-critical applications. A highperforming User Plane Function (UPF) in the data plane is critical to achieving such stringent performance goals, as it governs fast packet processing and supports several key controlplane operations. Based on a private 5G prototype implementation and analysis, it is imperative to perform dynamic resource management and orchestration at the UPF. This paper leverages Mobile Edge Cloud-Intelligent Agent (MEC-IA), a logically centralized entity that proactively distributes resources at UPF for various service types, significantly reducing the tail latency experienced by the user requests while maximizing resource utilization. Extending the MEC-IA functionality to MEC layers further incurs data plane latency reduction. Based on our extensive simulations, under skewed uRLLC traffic arrival, the MEC-IA assisted bestfit UPF-MEC scheme reduces the worstcase latency of UE requests by up to 77.8% w.r.t. baseline. Additionally, the system can increase uRLLC connectivity gain by 2.40× while obtaining 40% CapEx savings.

Reconfigurable Hybrid (electrical/optical) Network (RHN) [1-4, 6, 8, 10, 11, 13-19] for modern datacenter architectures has gained significant momentum during the last decade. The primary advantage of such RHN architectures is the dynamic topological reconfigurability enabled by optical circuit switches (OCS). On one hand, RHN can benefit throughput-intensive applications by providing on-demand high-bandwidth links between the hosts (CPU/GPU/TPU), such as distributed deep neural network training and recommendation systems, etc. On the other hand, RHN can reduce the hop-count between the host pairs, improving the performance for latency-sensitive applications such as real-time customer interactions with in-memory file system. However, previous works mostly focused on finding a suitable topology to efficiently handle a given traffic demand. Performing such topology update together with SDN policy update in a holistic manner while maintaining per-packet consistency and other network invariants is still an open issue. Existing network maintenance and policy update solutions define the notion of per-packet consistency assuming a pure SDN network where the physical network topology is static. This assumption does not hold for RHN because dynamic topology reconfiguration is inherent to RHN. In this paper, first, we define an extended notion of per-packet consistency and discuss the other critical requirements for RHN updates. Next, we provide an abstraction of RHN update and propose Transtate, a general method to perform such RHN update while satisfying the critical requirements. We believe such innovations remove one of the key obstacles towards reconfigurable-hybrid SDN.

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All-optical circuit switched network core is the holy grail for the next-generation datacenter architectures, as electrical packet switches are struggling to cope up with increasing challenges posed by the end of Moore's law. However, traffic skewness is the biggest enemy of such all-optical network cores comprising of a simple round-robin circuit-scheduling abstraction. Even though valiant load balancing can theoretically solve the problem, it falls short in most of the practical scenarios. In this paper, we point towards a new research direction to address the skewness problem : why not resolve most of the skewness at the network edge while keeping the optical core simple? This approach is fundamentally different and can potentially enable the all-optical network core to achieve good performance in practice. We discuss relevant strategies and envision that a holistic system design is necessary considering all these strategies together.

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