Spectral efficiency and energy efficiency of distributed antenna systems with virtual cells

In this paper, we consider user centric virtual cells model in distributed antenna systems (DAS). We investigate different power allocation optimization problems with interferences in DAS with and without user centric virtual cells model, respectively. The first objective problem is maximizing spectral efficiency (SE) of the DAS with user centric virtual cells model under the constraints of the minimum SE requirements of each user equipment (UE), maximum transmit power of each remote access unit (RAU). We firstly transform this non-convex objective function into a difference of convex functions (D.C.) problem, and then we obtain the optimal solutions by using the concave-convex procedure (CCCP) algorithm. The second objective problem is maximizing energy efficiency (EE) of the DAS with user centric virtual cells model under the same constraints as the first objective problem. Firstly, we exploit fractional programming theory to obtain the equivalent objective function of the second problem with subtract form, and then transform it into a D.C. problem and use CCCP algorithm to obtain the optimal power allocation. In each part, we propose the corresponding optimal power allocation algorithm and also use similar method to obtain optimal solutions of the same optimization problems in DAS without using user centric virtual cells model. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the DAS with user centric virtual cells model, which can significantly improve the SE and the EE of the communication systems.     

可靠的虚拟网络映射算法研究

网络虚拟化技术允许多个异构的虚拟网络共享一个底层物理网络资源,为目前的网络架构提供了一种有效的扩展手段.近年来,底层网络基础设施失效事件频发,因此如何提高虚拟网络的可靠性成为目前该领域一个研究热点.本文针对底层节点失效后虚拟拓扑如何最大化连通问题进行研究,设计了一种基于割集和拥塞感知的虚拟网络映射机制.实验表明,该方法在不预留保护资源的情况下,可获得更好的底层网络长期运行平均收益.     

Shared Risk Link Group (SRLG)-Diverse Path Provisioning Under Hybrid Service Level Agreements in Wavelength-Routed Optical Mesh Networks

The static provisioning problem in wavelength-routed optical networks has been studied for many years. However, service providers are still facing the challenges arising from the special requirements for provisioning services at the optical layer. In this paper, we incorporate some realistic constraints into the static provisioning problem, and formulate it under different network resource availability conditions. We consider three classes of shared risk link group (SRLG)-diverse path protection schemes: dedicated, shared, and unprotected. We associate with each connection request a lightpath length constraint and a revenue value. When the network resources are not sufficient to accommodate all the connection requests, the static provisioning problem is formulated as a revenue maximization problem, whose objective is maximizing the total revenue value. When the network has sufficient resources, the problem becomes a capacity minimization problem with the objective of minimizing the number of used wavelength-links. We provide integer linear programming (ILP) formulations for these problems. Because solving these ILP problems is extremely time consuming, we propose a tabu search heuristic to solve these problems within a reasonable amount of time. We also develop a rerouting optimization heuristic, which is based on previous work. Experimental results are presented to compare the solutions obtained by the tabu search heuristic and the rerouting optimization heuristic. For both problems, the tabu search heuristic outperforms the rerouting optimization heuristic.     

Protection Management for Guaranteed User‐Driven Virtual Circuit Services in Dynamic Multi‐domain Environments: Design Issues and Challenges

Fault management of virtualized network environments using user‐driven network provisioning systems (NPSs) is crucial for guaranteeing seamless virtual network services irrespective of physical infrastructure impairment. The network service interface (NSI) of the Open Grid Forum reflects the need for a common standard management API for the reservation and provisioning of user‐driven virtual circuits (VCs) across global networks. NSI‐based NPSs (that is, network service agents) can be used to compose user‐driven VCs for mission‐critical applications in a dynamic multi‐domain. In this article, we first attempt to outline the design issues and challenges faced when attempting to provide mission‐critical applications using dynamic VCs with a protection that is both user‐driven and trustworthy in a dynamic multi‐domain environment, to motivate work in this area of research. We also survey representative works that address inter‐domain VC protection and qualitatively evaluate them and current NSI against the issues and challenges.     

A flexible and distributed architecture for adaptive end-to-end QoS provisioning in next-generation networks

A novel distributed end-to-end quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning architecture based on the concept of decoupling the end-to-end QoS provisioning from the service provisioning at routers in the differentiated service (DiffServ) network is proposed. The main objective of this architecture is to enhance the QoS granularity and flexibility offered in the DiffServ network model and improve both the network resource utilization and user benefits. The proposed architecture consists of a new endpoint admission control referred to as explicit endpoint admission control at the user side, the service vector which allows a data flow to choose different services at different routers along its data path, and a packet marking architecture and algorithm at the router side. The achievable performance of the proposed approach is studied, and the corresponding results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism can have better service differentiation capability and lower request dropping probability than the integrated service over DiffServ schemes. Furthermore, it is shown that it preserves a friendly networking environment for conventional transmission control protocol flows and maintains the simplicity feature of the DiffServ network model.     

New algorithm for hub-and-spoke topological virtual networks embedding problem

The virtual network embedding/mapping problem is a core issue of the network virtualization.It's mainly concerned with how to map virtual network requests to the substrate network efficiently.Previous ...     

A cloud database route scheduling method using a hybrid optimization algorithm

Cloud computing has appeared as a technology allowing a company to employ computing resources such as applications, software, and hardware to calculate over the Internet. Scholars have paid great attention to cloud computing because of its cutting-edge availability, cost decrement, and boundless applications. A cloud database is a data storage site on the web where the optimal path is spotted to access the needed database. So, placing the ideal path to a database is crucial. The cloud database defined the scheduling problem to choose the perfect route. Cloud database path scheduling is a multifaceted procedure consisting of congestion control, routing list, and network flow distribution. It has a postponement in searching for the needed source route from the cloud database. Offering numerous infinite resources with the growing database workload is an NP-Hard optimization problem where the query request needs optimal schedules to respond to the required services. So, we have used a hybrid cuckoo search (CS) and genetic algorithm (GA), motivated by a social bird's phenomenon, to solve this problem. Integrating genetic operators has dramatically enhanced the balance between the capability of searching and utilization.     

On-Demand Provisioning of Data-Aggregation Sessions Over WDM Optical Networks

We consider efficient network provisioning algorithms for applications that aggregate large data files from multiple remote sites to a central facility (where the aggregated data is further processed). Many important bandwidth-hungry scientific applications use such data aggregation, and it is important to efficiently use network resources to meet their requirements. We term an entire large-scale data-aggregation session as a data-aggregation request (DAR). In this paper, we investigate the problem of on-demand provisioning of DARs over a wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) backbone network infrastructure. Our DAR provisioning problem is challenging, as for each DAR we need to jointly identify lightpaths (route, assign wavelengths, and groom) for each of the to-be-transferred files, and schedule DAR's file transfers in time. We first model our DAR provisioning problem mathematically as a mixed integer linear program (MILP); to solve our problem in practice, we propose a DAR provisioning algorithm (named DARP). From our numerical results, we find DARP to be efficient when compared with other benchmark algorithms. We study DARP's performance for a varying number of aggregating sites deployed in the network (i.e., sites with supercomputer facilities) and perform a detailed sensitivity analysis on several parameters of our problem. We also investigate the effect of partitioning the data to be transferred into pieces and conclude that, if the partitioning method is carefully designed, slight improvement over the approach that transfers the whole file (DARP) is possible.     

Optimal user selection and power allocation for revenue maximization in non‐orthogonal multiple access systems

A novel algorithm for joint user selection and optimal power allocation for Stackelberg game‐based revenue maximization in a downlink non‐orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) network is proposed in this study. The condition for the existence of optimal solution is derived by assuming perfect channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter. The Lagrange multiplier method is used to convert the revenue maximization problem into a set of quadratic equations that are reduced to a regular chain of expressions. The optimal solution is obtained via a univariate iterative procedure. A simple algorithm for joint optimal user selection and power calculation is presented and exhibits extremely low complexity. Furthermore, an outage analysis is presented to evaluate the performance degradation when perfect CSI is not available. The simulation results indicate that at 5‐dB signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR), revenue of the base station improves by at least 15.2% for the proposed algorithm when compared to suboptimal schemes. Other performance metrics of NOMA, such as individual user‐rates, fairness index, and outage probability, approach near‐optimal values at moderate to high SNRs.     

Exploring online virtual networks mapping with stochastic bandwidth demand in multi-datacenter

Network virtualization serves as a promising technique for providing a flexible and highly adaptable shared substrate network to satisfy the diversity of demands and overcoming the ossification of Internet infrastructure. As a key issue of constructing a virtual network (VN), various state-of-the-art algorithms have been proposed in many research works for addressing the VN mapping problem. However, these traditional works are efficient for mapping VN which with deterministic amount of network resources required, they even deal with the dynamic resource demand by using over-provisioning. These approaches are obviously not advisable, since the network resources are becoming more and more scarce. In this paper, we investigate the online stochastic VN mapping (StoVNM) problem, in which the VNs are generated as a Poisson process and each bandwidth demand x _i follows a normal distribution, i.e., x _i ~ N(μ _i , σ _i ²). Firstly, we formulate the model for StoVNM problem by mixed integer linear programming, which with objective including minimum-mapping-cost and load balance. Then, we devise a sliding window approach-based heuristic algorithm w-StoVNM for tackling this NP-hard StoVNM problem efficiently. The experimental results achieved from extensive simulation experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach and superiority than traditional solutions for VN mapping in terms of VN mapping cost, blocking ratio, and total net revenue in the long term.     

Power-aware virtual optical network provisioning in flexible bandwidth optical networks [Invited]

Considering the virtual network infrastructure as a service, optical network virtualization can facilitate the physical infrastructure sharing among different clients and applications that require optical network resources. Obviously, mapping multiple virtual network infrastructures onto the same physical network infrastructure is one of the greatest challenges related to optical network virtualization in flexible bandwidth optical networks. In order to efficiently address the virtual optical network (VON) provisioning problem, we can first obtain the virtual links’ order and the virtual nodes’ order based on their characteristics, such as the bandwidth requirement on virtual links and computing resources on virtual nodes. We then preconfigure the primary and backup paths for all node-pairs in the physical optical network, and the auxiliary graph is constructed by preconfiguring primary and backup paths. Two VON mapping approaches that include the power-aware virtual-links mapping (PVLM) approach and the power-aware virtual-nodes mapping (PVNM) approach are developed to reduce power consumption for a given set of VONs in flexible bandwidth optical networks with the distributed data centers. Simulation results show that our proposed PVLM approach can greatly reduce power consumption and save spectrum resources compared to the PVNM approach for the single-line rate and the mixed-line rate in flexible bandwidth optical networks with the distributed data centers.     

Multipath routing with topology aggregation for scalable inter-domain service provisioning in optical networks

In this paper, we propose to use static virtual topology for a scalable inter-domain optical service provisioning, while addressing the resource efficiency issue by using multipath routing. To this end, we discuss methods for virtual topology aggregation with consideration of inter-domain routing, and propose two heuristic algorithms for two representative applications, referred to as real-time streaming and bulk data transfer. We consider specific requirements of each application, including transmission deadline and jitter, and evaluate the impact of differential delay issue of multipath routing on the performance of proposed algorithms. Numerical results show that the proposed multipath routing algorithms yield a low blocking ratio of inter-domain connections even on the static virtual topology, which is known for poor blocking performance otherwise. The resulting differential delay is sufficiently small for the studied applications, and can be compensated with relatively small buffers. We show that a scalable inter-domain service provisioning in optical networks can be achieved by using a combination of static virtual topology and multipath routing.     

Greedy–knapsack algorithm for optimal downlink resource allocation in LTE networks

The long term evolution as a mobile broadband technology supports a wide domain of communication services with different requirements. Therefore, scheduling of all flows from various applications in overload states in which the requested amount of bandwidth exceeds the limited available spectrum resources is a challenging issue. Accordingly, in this paper, a greedy algorithm is presented to evaluate user candidates which are waiting for scheduling and select an optimal set of the users to maximize system performance, without exceeding available bandwidth capacity. The greedy–knapsack algorithm is defined as an optimal solution to the resource allocation problem, formulated based on the fractional knapsack problem. A compromise between throughput and QoS provisioning is obtained by proposing a class-based ranking function, which is a combination of throughput and QoS related parameters defined for each application. The simulation results show that the proposed method provides high performance in terms of throughput, loss and delay for different classes of QoS over the existing ones, especially under overload traffic.     

Resource availability–aware adaptive provisioning of virtual data center networks

Optimal provisioning of virtual networks with varying topologies on their physical counterpart is a major challenge in cloud data centers. Embedding the virtual network on the shared physical infrastructure poses a multitude of challenges to the infrastructure provider. This paper proposes a hybrid approach which adapts to the availability and fragmentation level of residual resources for near‐optimal mapping of multiple virtual data center networks on a substrate data center network. The proposed technique uses coordinated static and dynamic embedding phases, adaptively, to maximize the density of embedding which increases the revenue of the cloud service provider. Also, it judiciously modifies the existing mappings for efficient utilization of resources. Empirical results show that the proposed hybrid approach can attain ～10% higher acceptance ratio compared with the existing exact and heuristic techniques in the literature. With the proposed mixed integer programming model for static embedding, the average path length is reduced by 20% compared with the existing techniques.     

Mobility aware edge service migration strategy

To address the problem of load imbalance among edge servers and quality of service degradation caused by dynamic changes of user locations in mobile edge computing networks,a mobility aware edge service migration algorithm was proposed.Firstly,the optimization problem was formulated as a mix integer nonlinear programming problem,with the goal of minimizing the perceived delay of user service request.Then,the delay optimization problem was decoupled into the edge service migration and edge node selection sub-problems based on the Lyapunov optimization approach.Thereafter,the fast edge decision algorithm was proposed to optimize the resource allocation and edge service migration under a given radio access strategy.Finally,the asynchronous optimal response algorithm was proposed to iterate out the optimal radio access strategy.Simulation results validate the proposed algorithm can reduce the perceived delay under the service migration cost constraint while comparing with other existing algorithms.     

The design and implementation of an extensible, user-management service for communications applications - [topics in design & implentation]

Many network administration organizations, including communication service providers, are faced with the problem of managing a growing number of applications with fewer administrators. Administrators are required to provision and administer application-specific data in order for users (e.g., subscribers) to access and use communication applications. Although there are several approaches for solving the problem of sharing identity data across applications, a general solution for provisioning and sharing the complete user or subscriber profile has not been defined. This article describes the design and implementation of an extensible, user-management service that solves the problem of the redundant data entry required in provisioning and maintaining multiple communication applications. An important aspect of the design is the capability of the user-management service to be extended at run time without requiring an upgrade of the service and without impacting already deployed applications. Key lessons that can be applied to reduce the time and cost for other organizations faced with implementing user- or subscriber-management projects also are described.     

跨域虚拟网络映射问题研究

该文研究网络虚拟化环境下的跨域虚拟网络映射问题,提出一种集中式管理、分布式控制的分层分域虚拟网络资源管理架构。在此基础上,构建了一种有效的虚拟网络跨域映射框架,在此框架下将涉及到跨域的虚拟网络请求进行划分,并以最小化虚拟网络映射开销为目标,基于优化的人工蜂群算法进行最优划分方案的求解。仿真结果表明该方法在平均划分时间、虚拟网络请求接受率和平均额外映射等方面相比传统方法具有更好的性能。     

Towards efficiently migrating virtual networks in cloud-based data centers

With the expansion of cloud computing, virtual network (VN) migration becomes the very perspective technology for saving energy, ensuring Service Level Agreements or improving the survivability of virtual networks in cloud networks. At present, the majority of research on the VN migration, however, are for saving energy or improving resource utilizations, and few of them for the entire virtual network migration for guaranteeing QoS or improving the survivability of virtual networks. Since the regional failure, network maintenance or QoS violation, the service provider generally needs to migrate the VN for guaranteeing the QoS or improving the survivability of virtual networks. In the paper, we research the live migration problem of the virtual network to optimize the virtual network migration performance. To efficient migrate virtual network, we present an effective VN migration method, VNM. To control the cost of migration or migration traffic, based on the VNM algorithm, we present an effective VN migration method with migration traffic control, VNM-MTC. We use two networks as substrate networks to simulate the performances of our presented algorithms. From the experiment, we can see that the total VN reconfiguration cost, total VN redeployment cost, total VN migration cost and blocking ratio of our presented algorithms are better than that of the contrast algorithm.     

基于滑动区域的粒子群虚拟网节能映射算法

针对传统虚拟网节能映射中存在的节点映射分散、链路映射跳数多等问题,利用虚拟网请求的最小生成树拓扑将节点和链路同时映射,该文提出了基于滑动区域的粒子群虚拟网节能映射算法(EVNE_SRPS)。当一个虚拟网请求到达时,生成其最小生成树拓扑,根节点为路径和最短的节点;在底层网络随机选取多个区域作为粒子对象,并在区域中心映射虚拟网请求的最小生成树拓扑;计算粒子的适应度,求出群体和个体最优解,并在最优解的指导下确定滑动方向、更新区域位置,经过迭代后得到虚拟网的映射方案。实验结果表明,与现有算法相比,该算法降低了网络能耗,提高了运营商的收益成本比。     

Adaptive DC interconnection provisioning in distributed all-optical micro-datacenters using holistically SDN orchestration for dynamic access

The metro-embedded datacenter (ME-DC) architecture which is based on micro-DCs (mDC) is introduced and implemented to deliver more flexible services with less access latency. Hierarchical SDN control is employed to adaptively interconnect the distributed mDCs and the metro network slices into re-configurable virtual DC (VDC). Such an approach improves the overall resource mobility, especially for traveling users that need to dynamically access the service. In this paper, the VDC re-configuration and pre-configuration mechanisms for dynamic user access are proposed and demonstrated for the first time. In specific, by re-configuring the VDC with the most accessible resources with user location tracking, fast and flexible service is provided with consistent service access. Furthermore, by pre-configuring the VDC with user prediction, mDC and metro network resources are reserved in advance for users in order to provide seamless service. Demonstration based on the implemented ME-DC prototype shows that VDC is adaptively constructed for dynamic user access with fast and flexible service provisioning.