Dirk Kutscher

The OPNFV project has released its first major software release "Arno".

OPNFV is a carrier-grade,integrated,  open source platform to accelerate the introduction of new Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) products and services.

Arno is a developer-focused release that provides an initial build of the NFV Infrastructure (NFVI) and Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM) components of ETSI NFV architecture.

Key capabilities of OPNFV Arno:

• Availability of baseline platform: Arno enables continuous integration, automated deployment and testing of components from upstream projects such as Ceph, KVM, OpenDaylight, OpenStack and Open vSwitch. It allows developers and users to automatically install and explore the platform.
• Ability to deploy and test various VNFs: End users and developers can deploy their own or third party VNFs on Arno to test its functionality and performance in various traffic scenarios and use cases.
• Availability of test infrastructure in community-hosted labs: Agile testing plays a crucial role in the OPNFV platform. With Arno, the project is unveiling a community test labs infrastructure where users can test the platform in different environments and on different hardware. This test labs infrastructure enables the platform to be exercised in different NFV scenarios to ensure that the various open source components come together to meet vendor and end user needs.
• Allows automatic continuous integration of specific components: As upstream projects are developed independently they require testing of various OPNFV use cases to ensure seamless integration and interworking within the platform. OPNFV’s automated toolchain allows continuous automatic builds and verification.

 

Links

• https://www.opnfv.org/arno

• OPNFV’s First Milestone: A Toe-dip in the River

• Press Release: OPNFV Delivers Open Source Software to Enable Deployment of Network Functions Virtualization Solutions

 

Chris Wright and I presented on "The Next Step of OpenStack Evolutionfor NFV Deployments" at last week's OpenStack Summit in Vancouver.

Presentation at OpenStack Summit

NFV is now a well-known concept and in an early deployment stage, leveraging and adapting OpenStack and other Open Source Software systems. In the OPNFV project, a large group of industry peers is building a carrier-grade, integrated, open source reference platform for the NFV community. The telco industry has successfully adopted Open Source Software for carrier-grade deployments. It is now time for taking the next steps and to extend the colloaboration with upstream projects -- by opening up previously proprietary developments, by contributing code and other artifacts in order to create a ecosystem of NFV platforms, applications, and management/orchestration systems.

This presentation shares some insights on how Red Hat and NEC are working together to foster collaboration in the NFV ecosystem by actively working with OpenStack and other upstream projects.

NEC has pioneered the adoption of Linux, KVM, Open vSwitch, and OpenStack for their mobile network core product line (virtualized EPC)
and has gained significant experience through development work and deployments. NEC's extensions for high efficiency and high
availability have led to contributions of new features to OpenStack, such as DPDK vSwitch control and CPU allocation features. For NEC, it is very important to have those features integrated into the mainstream code base for building reliable infrastructure systems.

Red Hat, one of main contributors to OpenStack, leads the development of those functions to meet NFV requirements in OpenStack, making critical and demanding applications run of top of open platforms. The presentation explains how NEC and Red Hat are integrating and optimizing Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and NFV, along with contributions to open source communities, including OpenStack and Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV).

I presented GreenICN work on Scalable Content Exchange in Challenged ICNs at CCNxCon-2015 this week.

Download: ccnxcon2015-kutscher.pdf

Abstract:
The principles of Information­Centric Networking (ICN), accessing data objects by name (not by location address), securing data objects (not connections), in­network caching (for sharing, repair, rate adaptation) make ICN attractive for a wide range of application scenarios beyond traditional data center or telco access network scenarios. In fact, one of the first instantiation of ICN had been developed based on Delay­Tolerant Networking (DTN) technologies.

Currently, ICN/DTN is considered a promising approach for enabling/enhancing communication in disaster scenarios. In such scenarios, so­called ICN data mules (that carry and disseminate data times) may move randomly, and each time data mules encounter one another exchange data items. We envision that in such a scenario where there is no connectivity, data mules (e.g. vehicles or drones) can move around randomly. So these mobile routers interact with end users, working base stations and other data mules to fetch and deliver the data and queries. Thus, we do not consider adhoc networks where you can build a path to the destination reactively or proactively, rather a DTN like scenario.

Consider a large scale disaster scenario like the earthquake in Japan in 2011 , where people in different parts of the city are stranded without the internet connectivity. But there are some zones, where base stations are still working and providing connectivity. Essentially, the scenario is such that ICN data mule move randomly across a geographic area, and when meeting end­users receive interests from them and also forward corresponding data items to end­users (if present in the content store / cache of the data mule). At the same time, when data mules encounter each other, they forward to each other certain end­user interest and/or data items (according to a predefined rule set and algorithm), such that interests and data items can be forwarded in a hop­by­hop DTN fashion. One research problem in such a scenario is how to optimize such data exchanges among data mules for optimal data dissemination (e.g. optimizing how many desired messages reach their recipients within a given timeframe with a given forwarding strategy, assuming that data mules only have limited time at each encounter to exchange
messages).

 

The ICN Research Group of the IRTF has met for a two day meeting in Cambridge, MA on January 13/14. More than 30 researchers from the US, Europe, China, and Japan gathered to discuss hot research topics in ICN such as:

• Native ICN-based video streaming
• Security (authenticated denial in ICN)
• IoT and ICN
• Hop-by-hop control messages in CCN
• Named Function Networking

In addition, different groups presented updates on their current implementations and their design decisions for packet formats and ICN protocols. For CCN-based protocols further steps towards a common format have been made.

• Complete Agenda
• Presentation Material

The next meeting (planned for the week of March 23rd in Dallas, at IETF-92) will continue the packet format discussion and progress new topics such as Named Function Networking.

 

The Call for Papers for the 2nd ACM Conference on ICN is out:

 

                         Call for Papers

** 2nd ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ICN 2015) **

 

Sponsored by ACM and ACM SIGCOMM

 

http://conferences.sigcomm.org/acm-icn/2015

 

San Francisco, USA, September 30 - October 2, 2015

 

 

Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a new network architecture intended to provide access to information without requiring an explicit binding of that information to a particular location. By directly addressing information, ICN supports mobile users and mobile networked devices, offers a higher-level communication service to applications, and promotes authentication and efficiency in the transmission and dissemination of information. Over the last few years, a global research and development community has grown around the idea of ICN.

 

ACM ICN 2015 is the second edition of the ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking, which follows a series of workshops on ICN held in conjunction with the ACM Sigcomm conference.  ACM ICN 2015 is the premier international forum for researchers and practitioners to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, experiences, and challenges in information centric networking.  ACM ICN 2015 will be a single-track conference featuring paper and poster presentations, panel discussions, and demonstrations.

 

The Technical Program Committee of ACM ICN 2015 invites high-quality submissions describing unpublished research results in all aspects of ICN, with particular emphasis on contributions to architectural designs and reproducible experimental evaluations.  Papers submitted for consideration should not have been already published elsewhere and should not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere during the consideration period.

Specifically, authors are required to adhere to the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism

(http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/plagiarism_policy) and the ACM Policy on Prior Publication and Simultaneous Submissions (http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/sim_submissions).

 

Topics of interest include:

 

* Architecture design and evaluation

* Comparison of different ICN architectures

* Interoperability across ICN architectures

* ICN evaluation methodology and metrics

* Analysis of scalability issues in ICN

* ICN enabled applications

* Routing in ICN

* Transport issues in ICN

* Caching

* Mobility support

* Trust management and access control

* Management in ICN

* ICN economics and business models

* Tools, experimentation facilities, and measurement methodology for ICN

* Experience from implementation

* Feasibility studies of ICN for high speed networking

* Privacy

* ICN Deployment

* ICN APIs

 

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Submission Instructions

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Submitted papers can be up to 10 pages in length following the SIGCOMM format. All submissions must be in English and in PDF format. Submissions that do not comply with these instructions will be rejected without review.

Papers must be submitted electronically through the ICN 2015 submission site.

 

Submissions will be reviewed and evaluated on the basis of originality, importance of contribution, soundness, evaluation, quality of presentation and appropriate comparison to related work. The program committee as a whole will make final decisions about which submissions to accept for presentation at the conference. The program committee may propose that authors present their work with a poster accompanied by a 2-page extended abstract. ACM ICN 2015 also invites proposals for demos, tutorials and panel sessions.

 

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Important Dates

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Full Paper Submission: May 22, 2015

Acceptance Notification: July 20, 2015

Camera Ready Due: Aug. 15, 2015

Conference: September 30 - October 2, 2015

 

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Conference General Chairs

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- Nacho (Ignacio) Solis (PARC, USA)

 

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Technical Program Committee Chairs

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- Antonio Carzaniga (USI, Switzerland)

- K. K. Ramakrishnan (UC Riverside, USA)

 

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Technical Program Committee Members

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- Mayutan Arumaithurai (University of Goettingen, Germany)

- Giuseppe Bianchi (University of Rome "Tor Vergata", Italy)

- Nicola Blefari-Melazzi (University of Rome "Tor Vergata", Italy)

- Jeff Burke (UCLA, USA)

- Kenneth Calvert (University of Kentuky, USA)

- Giovanna Carofiglio (Cisco)

- Patrick Crowley (Washington University, USA)

- Christian Esteve Rothenberg (UNICAMP, Brazil)

- JJ Garcia-Luna-Aceves (University of California Santa Cruz, USA)

- Toru Hasegawa (Osaka University, Japan)

- Jussi Kangasharju (University of Helsinki, Finland)

- Satyajayant Misra (New Mexico State University, USA)

- Vishal Misra (Columbia University, USA)

- Luca Muscariello (Orange Labs, France)

- Kiran Nagaraja (Ericsson)

- Dave Oran (Cisco, USA)

- Jörg Ott (Aalto University, Finland)

- Christos Papadopoulos (Colorado State University, USA)

- Craig Partridge (BBN, USA)

- Diego Perino (Alcatel Lucent, France)

- George Polyzos (AUEB, Greece)

- Yiannis Psaras (UCL, UK)

- Dipankar Raychaudhuri (Rutgers University, USA)

- Jim Roberts (IRT SystemX, France)

- Dario Rossi (Telecom ParisTech, France)

- Thomas Schmidt (HAW Hamburg, Germany)

- Jan Seedorf (NEC Labs Europe)

- Nacho (Ignacio) Solis (PARC, USA)

- Karen Sollins (MIT, USA)

- Christian Tschudin (Uni Basel, Switzerland)

- Arun Venkataramani (UMass, USA)

- Matthias Wählisch (FU Berlin, Germany)

- Roy Yates (Rutgers University, USA)

- Lixia Zhang (UCLA, USA)

 

 

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More Details

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Please see http://conferences.sigcomm.org/acm-icn/2015

 

Dave Ward (Chief Architect at Cisco) gave an interesting lunch talk on the relationship between Open Standards and Open Source Software at IETF-91 today. Technologies such as OpenFlow and NFV are increasingly being advanced through Open Source Software projects that develop both individual components as well as larger systems. The developed artifacts are  sometimes being referred to as de-facto standards.

Dave gave some perspectives on how Open Source Software can help to speed up collaborative technology development and related this to standards work in the IETF and other bodies. Dave emphasized the importance of Open Standards for the development of Internet technologies but he pointed out that Open Standards can leverage Open Source to speed up specification development and to validate architecture and protocol specifications.

The talk suggested embracing Open Source Software development for standards work in the IETF, pointing at new working models and skill sets that were required for that.

Obviously, the IETF has always had a focus on running code for validating specification and several recent efforts have been leveraging OSS succesfully -- for example CORE, DTN and many others. Still, there was agreement that there is room for extending and potentially institutionalizing this.

 

 

 

 

One of the papers recenty presented at ICN-2014 described an interesting IoT implementation and corresponding experiment with CCN-Lite on the RIOT platform.

Previously, ICN has been perceived as providing conceptual benefits such as

• simplified, natural APIs to developers;
• increased robustness through caching;
• facilitating data fusion through hop-by-hop replication;
• reduced network stack layering; and
• inherent auto-configuration.

The authors describe their implementation of CCN-Lite on RIOT and their approach to realize IoT communication in a 60 node testbed. The idea is to apply Reactive Optimistic Name-based Routing (RONR), i.e., an ICN name-based forwarding approach to send requests for named information in an IoT network using a hybrid flooding/unicast approach.

Some results of their comparison:

• 70% less ROM, 80% less RAM usage by the stack implementation (compared to a RPL/6lowpan implementation);
• 50% reduction of transmitted packets thanks to RONR and ICN caching.

Some pointers for further reading:

•  Emmanuel Baccelli, Christian Mehlis, Oliver Hahm, Thomas C. Schmidt, Matthias Wählisch; Information Centric Networking in the IoT: Experiments with NDN in the Wild; ACM ICN-2014; September 2014; [paper], [presentation]
• CCN-Lite
• RIOT -- the friendly OS for the IoT
• ACM SIGCOMM ICN-2014

Linux Foundation has announced the creation of the  Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) project aiming at accelerating cloud-based delivery models for operators, enable interoperability and accelerate standards through an open source reference implementation.

OPNFV is expected to increase performance and power efficiency; improve reliability, availability and serviceability; and deliver comprehensive platform instrumentation. The initial scope of OPNFV will be on building NFV infrastructure (NFVI) and Virtualized Infrastructure Management (VIM) leveraging existing open source components where possible.

The initial project objectives are to:

• develop an integrated and tested open source platform that can be used to investigate and demonstrate core NFV functionality;
• include proactive participation of leading end users to validate that OPNFV meets the needs of the end user community;
• contribute to and participate in relevant open source projects that will be leveraged in the OPNFV reference platform;
• establish an open ecosystem for NFV solutions based on open standards and open source software; and
• promote OPNFV as the preferred open reference platform.

See the complete press release and the project website.

Four days to go until our first ICN conference!

It's going to be a blast of an event with a high-quality program, tutorials, demos, and panel discusions.

Check out the program: http://conferences2.sigcomm.org/acm-icn/2014/

Hope to see you in Paris at the conference.

 

The program of our Capacity Sharing Workshop at SIGCOMM-2014 (CSWS-2014, August 18th in Chicago) is online. This should be an interesting workshop -- we have received many interesting submissions and were able to compile a real good program:

 

Queuing and Scheduling

•  Revisiting Old Friends: Is CoDel Really Achieving What RED Cannot? (Nicolas Kuhn, Emmanuel Lochin and Olivier Mehani)
• Managing Fairness and Application Performance with Active Queue Management in DOCSIS-based Cable Networks (James Martin, Gongbing Hong and James Westall)
• WQM: An Aggregation-Aware Queue Management Scheme for IEEE 802.11n Based Networks (Ahmad Showail, Kamran Jamshaid and Basem Shihada)

Transport Protocols

• Coupled Congestion Control for RTP Media (Safiqul Islam, Michael Welzl, Stein Gjessing and Naeem Khademi)
• Experimental Evaluation of Multipath TCP Schedulers (Christoph Paasch, Simone Ferlin, Özgü Alay and Olivier Bonaventure)

Mobile Networks

• ConEx Lite for Mobile Networks (Steve Baillargeon and Ingemar Johansson)
• Mobile Network Sharing Between Operators: A Demand Trace-Driven Study (Paolo Di Francesco, Francesco Malandrino and Luiz Dasilva)
• Network Assisted Rate Adaptation for Conversational Video over LTE, Concept and performance evaluation (Ylva Timner, Jonas Pettersson, Hans Hannu, Min Wang and Ingemar Johansson)
• Self-clocked rate adaptation for conversational video in LTE (Ingemar Johansson)
• Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation for Multiple Network Connections: Improving User QoE and Network Usage of YouTube in Mobile Broadband (Florian Wamser, Thomas Zinner, Phuoc Tran-Gia and Jing Zhu)