Numerous systems have been designed which use virtualization to subdivide the ample resources of a modern computer. Some require specialized hardware, or cannot support commodity operating systems. Some target 100% binary compatibility at the expense of performance. Others sacrifice security or functionality for speed. Few offer resource isolation or performance guarantees; most provide only best-effort provisioning, risking denial of service.This paper presents Xen, an x86 virtual machine monitor which allows multiple commodity operating systems to share conventional hardware in a safe and resource managed fashion, but without sacrificing either performance or functionality. This is achieved by providing an idealized virtual machine abstraction to which operating systems such as Linux, BSD and Windows XP, can be ported with minimal effort.Our design is targeted at hosting up to 100 virtual machine instances simultaneously on a modern server. The virtualization approach taken by Xen is extremely efficient: we allow operating systems such as Linux and Windows XP to be hosted simultaneously for a negligible performance overhead --- at most a few percent compared with the unvirtualized case. We considerably outperform competing commercial and freely available solutions in a range of microbenchmarks and system-wide tests.

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Xen and the art of virtualization

Wireless sensor networks are composed of large numbers of tiny networked devices that communicate untethered. For large scale networks, it is important to be able to download code into the network dynamically. We present Contiki, a lightweight operating system with support for dynamic loading and replacement of individual programs and services. Contiki is built around an event-driven kernel but provides optional preemptive multithreading that can be applied to individual processes. We show that dynamic loading and unloading is feasible in a resource constrained environment, while keeping the base system lightweight and compact.

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Contiki - a lightweight and flexible operating system for tiny networked sensors

Praise for the Third Edition: "This is one of the best books available. Its excellent organizational structure allows quick reference to specific models and its clear presentation . . . solidifies the understanding of the concepts being presented."IIE Transactions on Operations EngineeringThoroughly revised and expanded to reflect the latest developments in the field, Fundamentals of Queueing Theory, Fourth Edition continues to present the basic statistical principles that are necessary to analyze the probabilistic nature of queues. Rather than presenting a narrow focus on the subject, this update illustrates the wide-reaching, fundamental concepts in queueing theory and its applications to diverse areas such as computer science, engineering, business, and operations research.This update takes a numerical approach to understanding and making probable estimations relating to queues, with a comprehensive outline of simple and more advanced queueing models. Newly featured topics of the Fourth Edition include:Retrial queuesApproximations for queueing networksNumerical inversion of transformsDetermining the appropriate number of servers to balance quality and cost of serviceEach chapter provides a self-contained presentation of key concepts and formulae, allowing readers to work with each section independently, while a summary table at the end of the book outlines the types of queues that have been discussed and their results. In addition, two new appendices have been added, discussing transforms and generating functions as well as the fundamentals of differential and difference equations. New examples are now included along with problems that incorporate QtsPlus software, which is freely available via the book's related Web site.With its accessible style and wealth of real-world examples, Fundamentals of Queueing Theory, Fourth Edition is an ideal book for courses on queueing theory at the upper-undergraduate and graduate levels. It is also a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners who analyze congestion in the fields of telecommunications, transportation, aviation, and management science.

Fundamentals of Queueing Theory

Wireless sensor networks are composed of large numbers of tiny networked devices that communicate untethered. For large scale networks it is important to be able to dynamically download code into t ...

Contiki - a Lightweight and Flexible Operating System for Tiny Networked Sensors

The idea of programmable networks has recently re-gained considerable momentum due to the emergence of the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm. SDN, often referred to as a ''radical new idea in networking'', promises to dramatically simplify network management and enable innovation through network programmability. This paper surveys the state-of-the-art in programmable networks with an emphasis on SDN. We provide a historic perspective of programmable networks from early ideas to recent developments. Then we present the SDN architecture and the OpenFlow standard in particular, discuss current alternatives for implementation and testing of SDN-based protocols and services, examine current and future SDN applications, and explore promising research directions based on the SDN paradigm.

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A Survey of Software-Defined Networking: Past, Present, and Future of Programmable Networks

Support for multimedia applications by general purpose computing platforms has been the subject of considerable research. Much of this work is based on an evolutionary strategy in which small changes to existing systems are made. The approach adopted is to start ab initio with no backward compatibility constraints. This leads to a novel structure for an operating system. The structure aims to decouple applications from one another and to provide multiplexing of all resources, not just the CPU, at a low level. The motivation for this structure, a design based on the structure, and its implementation on a number of hardware platforms is described.

The design and implementation of an operating system to support distributed multimedia applications

In previous approaches to routing multicast connections in networks, the emphasis has been on the source transmitting to a fixed set of destinations (the multicast group). There are some applications where destinations will join and leave the multicast group. Under these conditions, computing an 'optimal' spanning tree after each modification may not be the best way to proceed. An alternative is to make modest alterations to an existing spanning tree to derive a new one. An extreme, though nonoptimal, variation of this is to use minimal cost source to destination routing for each destination, effectively ignoring the existing multicast tree. The authors examine just how nonoptimal these trees are in random general topology networks and conclude that they are worse by only a small factor. The factor is reduced still further if a hierarchy is imposed on the random network to give a more realistic model. >

How bad is naive multicast routing

Network latency is a problem for all cloud services. It can be mitigated by moving computation out of remote datacenters by rapidly instantiating local services near the user. This requires an embedded cloud platform on which to deploy multiple applications securely and quickly. We present Jitsu, a new Xen toolstack that satisfies the demands of secure multitenant isolation on resource-constrained embedded ARM devices. It does this by using unikernels: lightweight, compact, single address space, memory-safe virtual machines (VMs) written in a high-level language. Using fast shared memory channels, Jitsu provides a directory service that launches unikernels in response to network traffic and masks boot latency. Our evaluation shows Jitsu to be a power-efficient and responsive platform for hosting cloud services in the edge network while preserving the strong isolation guarantees of a type-1 hypervisor.

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Jitsu: just-in-time summoning of unikernels

Fairisle: an ATM network for the local area

This paper presents a novel approach to the control and management of ATM networks, by allowing different control architectures to be operational within the same network, and on the same switch. The resources available on an ATM switch are divided into switchlets, each of which encapsulates a subset of the physical ATM switch resources. A set of switchlets on different ATM switches combine to form a virtual ATM network Each virtual network created in this way can potentially use different control and management mechanisms which are collectively called a control architecture. For example one virtual network might run ATM Forum signalling, another might implement an IP switching control architecture, while yet another can be reserved for an in house secure control architecture. In this manner a new control architecture can be introduced into a network without disrupting existing services and applications, thereby facilitating change management in an elegant way. Switchlets and a control architecture from a well known set can be created on demand to allow the dynamic construction of virtual ATM networks of predefined type. Alternatively the control architecture can be supplied (by a ‘user’) after the virtual network has been created, thus allowing the dynamic creation of virtual ATM networks of arbitrary functionality. Finally, the paper presents a proof of concept implementation as well as ongoing work in this area.

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Ian Leslie

Papers

The design and implementation of an operating system to support distributed multimedia applications

How bad is naive multicast routing

Jitsu: just-in-time summoning of unikernels

Fairisle: an ATM network for the local area

Switchlets and dynamic virtual ATM networks