The planetary boundaries framework defines a safe operating space for humanity based on the intrinsic biophysical processes that regulate the stability of the Earth system. Here, we revise and update the planetary boundary framework, with a focus on the underpinning biophysical science, based on targeted input from expert research communities and on more general scientific advances over the past 5 years. Several of the boundaries now have a two-tier approach, reflecting the importance of cross-scale interactions and the regional-level heterogeneity of the processes that underpin the boundaries. Two core boundaries—climate change and biosphere integrity—have been identified, each of which has the potential on its own to drive the Earth system into a new state should they be substantially and persistently transgressed.

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Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet

The Internet has led to the creation of a digital society, where (almost) everything is connected and is accessible from anywhere. However, despite their widespread adoption, traditional IP networks are complex and very hard to manage. It is both difficult to configure the network according to predefined policies, and to reconfigure it to respond to faults, load, and changes. To make matters even more difficult, current networks are also vertically integrated: the control and data planes are bundled together. Software-defined networking (SDN) is an emerging paradigm that promises to change this state of affairs, by breaking vertical integration, separating the network's control logic from the underlying routers and switches, promoting (logical) centralization of network control, and introducing the ability to program the network. The separation of concerns, introduced between the definition of network policies, their implementation in switching hardware, and the forwarding of traffic, is key to the desired flexibility: by breaking the network control problem into tractable pieces, SDN makes it easier to create and introduce new abstractions in networking, simplifying network management and facilitating network evolution. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on SDN. We start by introducing the motivation for SDN, explain its main concepts and how it differs from traditional networking, its roots, and the standardization activities regarding this novel paradigm. Next, we present the key building blocks of an SDN infrastructure using a bottom-up, layered approach. We provide an in-depth analysis of the hardware infrastructure, southbound and northbound application programming interfaces (APIs), network virtualization layers, network operating systems (SDN controllers), network programming languages, and network applications. We also look at cross-layer problems such as debugging and troubleshooting. In an effort to anticipate the future evolution of this new paradigm, we discuss the main ongoing research efforts and challenges of SDN. In particular, we address the design of switches and control platforms—with a focus on aspects such as resiliency, scalability, performance, security, and dependability—as well as new opportunities for carrier transport networks and cloud providers. Last but not least, we analyze the position of SDN as a key enabler of a software-defined environment.

https://publications.uni.lu/bitstream/10993/20596/1/survey_on_SDN.pdf

Software-Defined Networking: A Comprehensive Survey

Preface How to Get the Software Part I. Linear Equations. 1. Basic Concepts and Stationary Iterative Methods 2. Conjugate Gradient Iteration 3. GMRES Iteration Part II. Nonlinear Equations. 4. Basic Concepts and Fixed Point Iteration 5. Newton's Method 6. Inexact Newton Methods 7. Broyden's Method 8. Global Convergence Bibliography Index.

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Iterative Methods for Linear and Nonlinear Equations

Survey of Numerical Methods for Trajectory Optimization

We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of B4, a private WAN connecting Google's data centers across the planet. B4 has a number of unique characteristics: i) massive bandwidth requirements deployed to a modest number of sites, ii) elastic traffic demand that seeks to maximize average bandwidth, and iii) full control over the edge servers and network, which enables rate limiting and demand measurement at the edge.These characteristics led to a Software Defined Networking architecture using OpenFlow to control relatively simple switches built from merchant silicon. B4's centralized traffic engineering service drives links to near 100% utilization, while splitting application flows among multiple paths to balance capacity against application priority/demands. We describe experience with three years of B4 production deployment, lessons learned, and areas for future work.

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B4: experience with a globally-deployed software defined wan

OpenFlow is a great concept, but its original design imposes excessive overheads. It can simplify network and traffic management in enterprise and data center environments, because it enables flow-level control over Ethernet switching and provides global visibility of the flows in the network. However, such fine-grained control and visibility comes with costs: the switch-implementation costs of involving the switch's control-plane too often and the distributed-system costs of involving the OpenFlow controller too frequently, both on flow setups and especially for statistics-gathering.In this paper, we analyze these overheads, and show that OpenFlow's current design cannot meet the needs of high-performance networks. We design and evaluate DevoFlow, a modification of the OpenFlow model which gently breaks the coupling between control and global visibility, in a way that maintains a useful amount of visibility without imposing unnecessary costs. We evaluate DevoFlow through simulations, and find that it can load-balance data center traffic as well as fine-grained solutions, without as much overhead: DevoFlow uses 10--53 times fewer flow table entries at an average switch, and uses 10--42 times fewer control messages.

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DevoFlow: scaling flow management for high-performance networks

Large-scale Internet applications, such as content distribution networks, are deployed across multiple datacenters and consume massive amounts of electricity. To provide uniformly low access latencies, these datacenters are geographically distributed and the deployment size at each location reflects the regional demand for the application. Consequently, an application's environmental impact can vary significantly depending on the geographical distribution of end-users, as electricity cost and carbon footprint per watt is location specific. In this paper, we describe FORTE: Flow Optimization based framework for request-Routing and Traffic Engineering. FORTE dynamically controls the fraction of user traffic directed to each datacenter in response to changes in both request workload and carbon footprint. It allows an operator to navigate the three-way tradeoff between access latency, carbon footprint, and electricity costs and to determine an optimal datacenter upgrade plan in response to increases in traffic load. We use FORTE to show that carbon taxes or credits are impractical in incentivizing carbon output reduction by providers of large-scale Internet applications. However, they can reduce carbon emissions by 10% without increasing the mean latency nor the electricity bill.

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It's not easy being green

Datacenters need high-bandwidth interconnection fabrics. Several researchers have proposed highly-redundant topologies with multiple paths between pairs of end hosts for datacenter networks. However, traffic management is necessary to effectively utilize the bisection bandwidth provided by these topologies. This requires timely detection of elephant flows—flows that carry large amount of data—and managing those flows. Previously proposed approaches incur high monitoring overheads, consume significant switch resources, and/or have long detection times. We propose, instead, to detect elephant flows at the end hosts. We do this by observing the end hosts's socket buffers, which provide better, more efficient visibility of flow behavior. We present Mahout, a low-overhead yet effective traffic management system that follows OpenFlow-like central controller approach for network management but augments the design with our novel end host mechanism. Once an elephant flow is detected, an end host signals the network controller using in-band signaling with low overheads. Through analytical evaluation and experiments, we demonstrate the benefits of Mahout over previous solutions.

Mahout: Low-overhead datacenter traffic management using end-host-based elephant detection

On the Estimation of Sparse Jacobian Matrices

The OpenFlow framework enables flow-level control over Ethernet switching, as well as centralized visibility of the flows in the network. OpenFlow's coupling of these features comes with costs, however: the distributed-system costs of involving the OpenFlow controller on flow setups, and the switch-implementation costs of involving the switch's control plane too often.In this paper, we analyze the overheads, and we propose DevoFlow, a modification of the OpenFlow model in which we try to gently break the coupling between centralized control and centralized visibility, in a way that maintains a useful amount of visibility without imposing unnecessary costs.

/pdf/devoflow-cost-effective-flow-management-for-high-performance-4cs1d70wqj.pdf

Andrew R. Curtis

Papers

DevoFlow: scaling flow management for high-performance networks

It's not easy being green

Mahout: Low-overhead datacenter traffic management using end-host-based elephant detection

On the Estimation of Sparse Jacobian Matrices

DevoFlow: cost-effective flow management for high performance enterprise networks