QoS and Resource-Aware Security Orchestration and Life Cycle Management

Abstract

Zero-touch network and Service Management (ZSM) exploits Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) to efficiently and dynamically orchestrate different Service Function Chaining (SFC), whereby reducing capital expenditure and operation expenses. The SFC is an optimization problem that shall consider different constraints, such as Quality of Service (QoS), and actual resources, to achieve cost-efficient scheduling and allocation of the service functions. However, the large-scale, complexity and security issues brought by virtualized IoT networks, which embrace different network segments, e.g. Fog, Edge, Core, Cloud, that can also exploit proximity (computation offloading of virtualized IoT functions to the Edge), imposes new challenges for ZSM orchestrators intended to optimize the SFC, thereby achieving seamless user-experience, minimal end-to-end delay at a minimal cost. To cope with these challenges, this paper proposes a cost-efficient optimized orchestration system that addresses the whole life-cycle management of different SFCs, that considers QoS (including end-to-end delay, bandwidth, jitters), actual capacities of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs), potentially deployed across multiple Clouds-Edges, in terms of resources (CPU, RAM, storage) and current network security levels to ensure trusted deployments. The proposed orchestration system has been implemented and evaluated in the scope of H2020 Anastacia EU project 1 , showing its feasibility and performance to efficiently manage SFC, optimizing deployment costs, reducing overall end-to-end delay and optimizing VNF instances distribution.

Trust in 5G and Beyond Networks

“…Thus, reliable and secure communications are paramount to ensure service availability while preventing data and privacy leakage. To this end, authentication, authorization, and transmission encryption services are required 4 . The authentication service guarantees that the communication is established among legitimate entities.…”

“…3. As a result, 5G introduces a new authentication framework enabling an end-user device to perform not only the primary authentication for network access, but also a secondary authentication for service access 4 . The control (signaling) messages and user data should be exchanged over encrypted and integrity-protected channels in order to ensure compliance with privacy regulations and obviate the risk of sensitive information leakage and tampering.…”

“…towards enabling fully autonomous management capabilities (e.g., self-configuration, self-provisioning, self-monitoring, self-assurance and self-protecting), leveraging SDN, NFV and AI technologies[4]. NFV is recognized as a key enabler for providing flexible, scalable, agile, and cost-effective provisioning and deployment of network services.…”

From zero to fog: Efficient engineering of fog‐based Internet of Things applications

“…Consequently, finding valid deployment options becomes exponentially harder with each added component and is infeasible for larger deployments. Tong et al 38 and, to some extent Heintz et al 36 take a similar approach to FogTorch, while 4‐7,35,39‐55 employ a more efficient heuristics approach to solve the formalized optimization problem. Naas et al 56 offer a heuristics‐based solution as well, but place data replicas rather than services, a challenge that is also addressed in References 57,58.…”

Towards Auction-Based Function Placement in Serverless Fog Platforms

“…In addition, an unhealthy Invoker is identified as such after not responding for a certain time, yet this delay can be an issue for low-latency use cases, since latency can grow considerably before the Invoker is switched into an unhealthy state. Before simply distinguishing between healthy and unhealthy controllers, 6 An OpenWhisk version released while we were writing this paper changed this: Open-Whisk no longer checks whether the available storage exceeds the maximum function size. Instead, it checks whether the available storage size exceeds the actual function size plus an estimated buffer based on the base64 encoding in CouchDB.…”