NCP+: An integrated network and IT control plane for cloud computing

Abstract

Cloud computing, building on the idea of "computation as a public utility" is made possible by the increased network capabilities in terms of bandwidth and reduced latency. Today, the cloud paradigm today sees adoption in many businesses, given its advantages not only from a customer point of view (e.g., universal access to the same applications across all company branches), but also from the application provider and network operator perspective (e.g., software updates no longer need to be distributed). To be able to offer cloud computing services efficiently, service providers need not just an infrastructure comprising both network and IT resources, but especially a control system that is able to orchestrate such integrated network and IT services. This paper offers a new proposal for such a system: an enhanced network control plane, the NCP+, which is based on a GMPLS control plane with a Hierarchical Path Computation Element (PCE) architecture able to jointly make network routing and IT server provisioning decisions. Indeed, in the assumed cloud paradigm, a user generally does not care what exact server the offered service is using, as long as its service requirements are met: the anycast principle applies. The paper discusses (i) the architecture of the NCP+, (ii) two IT-aware aggregation mechanisms to be used in the hierarchical PCE approach, and (iii) routing and scheduling algorithms for those aggregation mechanisms. We conclude this work with a thorough simulation analysis of the aggregation and routing/scheduling policies showing that Full Mesh aggregation where the domain topology is represented by a complete graph, although less scalable in terms of computation time, is able to provision efficiently using the proposed load balancing routing and scheduling policy. However, for a scenario with stringent IT requirements, Star could be used in parallel for scenarios where end-to-end setup times are important.

Towards a proper service placement in combined Fog-to-Cloud (F2C) architectures

“…Finally, geographically distributed DCs are adding complexity to the overall cloud management [29]. In this area, authors in [30] propose an integrated control plane for geographically distributed DCs. The paper introduces an enhanced network control plane architecture leveraging distinct strategies for network and IT resources aggregation in DCs.…”

“…An extension of the PCE [31], so-called Serviceoriented PCE (S-PCE), is presented in the position paper [36]. The presented S-PCE architecture is focused on service selection and allocation in mobile clouds and proclaims, albeit conceptually, to address important issues caused by the mobility, volatility and heterogeneity of mobile network elements -different from the work described in [30], where PCE is restricted to static clouds, as described in section 2.1. In a different application area, Fog Computing is applied in a healthcare scenario [37].…”

ABNO-driven content distribution in the telecom cloud

“…In [24] an enhanced control plane following a hierarchical PCE architecture is proposed for jointly perform network routing and IT server provisioning decisions applicable to anycast scenarios for IT resource selection. Routing and spectrum allocation algorithms are proposed in [25] for serving anycast connections over elastic optical networks; to select the destination of the anycast connection, a set of candidate paths is computed.…”

Mechanisms for service-oriented resource allocation in IoT

“…The deployment of an integrated control plane for geographically distributed DCs has also been subject of study recently. In [52], authors introduce an enhanced network control plane architecture leveraging distinct strategies for network and IT resources aggregation in DCs. Furthermore, the paper also proposes an orchestration mechanism to enable the identification and selection of DC services, by extending PCE to an IT-aware architecture.…”