Network function virtualization (NFV) has drawn significant attention from both industry and academia as an important shift in telecommunication service provisioning. By decoupling network functions (NFs) from the physical devices on which they run, NFV has the potential to lead to significant reductions in operating expenses (OPEX) and capital expenses (CAPEX) and facilitate the deployment of new services with increased agility and faster time-to-value. The NFV paradigm is still in its infancy and there is a large spectrum of opportunities for the research community to develop new architectures, systems and applications, and to evaluate alternatives and trade-offs in developing technologies for its successful deployment. In this paper, after discussing NFV and its relationship with complementary fields of software defined networking (SDN) and cloud computing, we survey the state-of-the-art in NFV, and identify promising research directions in this area. We also overview key NFV projects, standardization efforts, early implementations, use cases, and commercial products.

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Network Function Virtualization: State-of-the-Art and Research Challenges

A Comprehensive Survey of Network Function Virtualization

Information-centric networking (ICN) has been proposed as one of the future Internet architectures. It is poised to address the challenges faced by today’s Internet that include, but not limited to, scalability, addressing, security, and privacy. Furthermore, it also aims at meeting the requirements for new emerging Internet applications. To realize ICN, named data networking (NDN) is one of the recent implementations of ICN that provides a suitable communication approach due to its clean slate design and simple communication model. There are a plethora of applications realized through ICN in different domains where data is the focal point of communication. One such domain is intelligent transportation system realized through vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) where vehicles exchange information and content with each other and with the infrastructure. Up to date, excellent research results have been yielded in the VANET domain aiming at safe, reliable, and infotainment-rich driving experience. However, due to the dynamic topologies, host-centric model, and ephemeral nature of vehicular communication, various challenges are faced by VANET that hinder the realization of successful vehicular networks and adversely affect the data dissemination, content delivery, and user experiences. To fill these gaps, NDN has been extensively used as underlying communication paradigm for VANET. Inspired by the extensive research results in NDN-based VANET, in this paper, we provide a detailed and systematic review of NDN-driven VANET. More precisely, we investigate the role of NDN in VANET and discuss the feasibility of NDN architecture in VANET environment. Subsequently, we cover in detail, NDN-based naming, routing and forwarding, caching, mobility, and security mechanism for VANET. Furthermore, we discuss the existing standards, solutions, and simulation tools used in NDN-based VANET. Finally, we also identify open challenges and issues faced by NDN-driven VANET and highlight future research directions that should be addressed by the research community.

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Named Data Networking in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks: State-of-the-Art and Challenges

Purpose – Since its introduction in 2006, messages posted to the microblogging system Twitter have provided a rich dataset for researchers, leading to the publication of over a thousand academic papers. This paper aims to identify this published work and to classify it in order to understand Twitter based research.Design/methodology/approach – Firstly the papers on Twitter were identified. Secondly, following a review of the literature, a classification of the dimensions of microblogging research was established. Thirdly, papers were qualitatively classified using open coded content analysis, based on the paper's title and abstract, in order to analyze method, subject, and approach.Findings – The majority of published work relating to Twitter concentrates on aspects of the messages sent and details of the users. A variety of methodological approaches is used across a range of identified domains.Research limitations/implications – This work reviewed the abstracts of all papers available via database search...

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What do people study when they study Twitter? Classifying Twitter related academic papers

A content router comprising a plurality of interfaces configured to receive and forward a plurality of interests for content and content data in a content oriented network (CON), a cache configured to store content data, and a memory component configured to maintain a forward information base (FIB) that associates content with one or more interfaces on which the interests and content data are received and forwarded, and an availability FIB (AFIB) that associates content data with one or more corresponding collaborative caching routers in the CON that cache the content data.

Method for Collaborative Caching for Content-Oriented Networks

Content-Centric Networks (CCN) provide substantial flexibility for users to obtain information without regard to the source of the information or its current location. Publish/subscribe (pub/sub) systems have gained popularity in society to provide the convenience of removing the temporal dependency of the user having to indicate an interest each time he or she wants to receive a particular piece of related information. Currently, on the Internet, such pub/sub systems have been built on top of an IP-based network with the additional responsibility placed on the end-systems and servers to do the work of getting a piece of information to interested recipients. We propose Content-Oriented Pub/Sub System (COPSS) to achieve an efficient pub/sub capability for CCN. COPSS enhances the heretofore inherently pull-based CCN architectures proposed by integrating a push based multicast capability at the content-centric layer. We emulate an application that is particularly emblematic of a pub/sub environment -- Twitter -- but one where subscribers are interested in content (e.g., identified by keywords), rather than tweets from a particular individual. Using trace-driven simulation, we demonstrate that our architecture can achieve a scalable and efficient content centric pub/sub network. The simulator is parameterized using the results of careful micro benchmarking of the open source CCN implementation and of standard IP based forwarding. Our evaluations show that COPSS provides considerable performance improvements in terms of aggregate network load, publisher load and subscriber experience compared to that of a traditional IP infrastructure.

COPSS: An Efficient Content Oriented Publish/Subscribe System

Networks are becoming increasingly complex and service providers incorporate additional functionality in the network to protect, manage and improve service performance Software Defined Networking (SDN) seeks to manage the network with the help of a (logically) centralized control plane We observe that current SDN solutions pre-translate policy (what) into forwarding rules at specific switches (where) We argue that this choice limits the dynamicity, flexibility and reliability that a software based network could provide Information Centric Networking (ICN) shifts the focus of networks away from being predominantly location oriented communication environments We believe ICN can significantly improve the flexibility for network management In this paper, we focus on one of the problems of network management -- service chaining -- the steering of flows through the different network functions needed, before it is delivered to the destination We propose Function-Centric Service Chaining (FCSC), a solution that exploits ICN to provide flexibility in managing networks that utilize virtualization to dynamically place functions in the network as required We use a real-world topology to compare the performance of FCSC and a more ``traditional'' SDN solution We show that FCSC reacts to failures with fewer packet drops, adapts to new middleboxes more quickly, and maintains less state in the network

http://conferences2.sigcomm.org/acm-icn/2014/papers/p107.pdf

Exploiting ICN for flexible management of software-defined networks

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) treats content as a first-class entity — each content has a unique identity and ICN routers forward traffic based on content identity rather than the locations of the content. This provides benefits like dynamic request routing, caching and mobility support. The choice of naming schema (flat vs. hierarchical) is a fundamental design choice in ICN which determines the functional separation between the network layer and the application layer. With hierarchical names, the network layer is cognizant of the semantics of hierarchical names. Name space management is also part of network layer. ICN architectures using flat names leave these to the application layer. The naming schema affects the performance and scalability of the network in terms of forwarding efficiency, routing table size and name space size. This paper provides both qualitative and quantitative comparison on the two naming schemas using these metrics, noting that they are interdependent. We seek to understand which naming schema would be better for a high-performance, scalable ICN architecture.

Comparison of naming schema in ICN

Information-Centric Networking provides substantial flexibility for users to obtain information without knowing the source of information or its current location. With users increasingly focused on an online world, an emerging challenge for the network infrastructure is to support Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG). Currently, MMORPG is built on IP infrastructure with the primary responsibility resting on servers for disseminating control messages and predicting/retrieving objects belonging to each player's view. Scale and timeliness are major challenges of such a server-oriented gaming architecture. Limited server resources significantly impair the user's interactive experience, requiring game implementations to limit the number of players in a single game instance. We propose Gaming over COPSS (G-COPSS), a distributed communication infrastructure using a Content-Oriented Pub/Sub System (COPSS) to enable efficient decentralized information dissemination in MMORPG, jointly exploiting the network and end-systems for player management and information dissemination. G-COPSS aims to scale well in the number of players in a single game, while still meeting users' response time requirements. We have implemented G-COPSS on top of the open-source CCNx implementation. We use a simple game with a hierarchical map to carefully micro benchmark the implementation and the processing involved in managing game dynamics. We have also micro benchmarked the game based on NDN and a server with an IP infrastructure. We emulate an application that is particularly emblematic of MMORPG -- Counter-Strike -- but one in which all players share a hierarchical structured map. Using trace-driven simulation, we demonstrate that G-COPSS can achieve high scalability and tight timeliness requirements of MMORPG. The simulator is parameterized based on micro benchmarks of our implementation. Our evaluations show that G-COPSS provides orders of magnitude improvement in update latency and a factor of two reduction in aggregate network load compared to a server-based implementation.

G-COPSS: A Content Centric Communication Infrastructure for Gaming Applications

Disaster management critically depends on timely and ecient communication. To better deal with an incident, authorities from dierent services ( e.g., fire, police) and jurisdictions need to work together in a new dynamically created team, dierent from their original organizational/administrative hierarchy. Unfortunately, existing solutions (e.g., IP, or traditional telephony) are not wellsuited to deal with such group communication due to the dynamic binding between roles and individuals, and mobility. A significant burden is placed on administrators to just establish and maintain necessary channels, distracting them from restoring order. To make things worse, since senders do not know which individual(s) to send to, information cannot reach the right people, delaying rescue eorts. We propose CNS, leveraging the benefits of ICN to provide the essential communication for eciently managing disasters. We first design a namespace enabling dynamic creation and evolution of incident related (sub-)namespaces to represent roles of first responders assigned to the disaster. This allows first responders to receive the appropriate information on a timely basis, with senders addressing the recipients based on their roles. Predefined namespace templates for disaster types minimize management overhead for establishing communication. We also find the need for a new enhanced forwarding rule to support such a recipient hierarchy. We have developed a prototype demonstrating feasibility and eciency. With the help of large-scale simulations and real-world disaster traces, we compare CNS with an IP-based solution. CNS can significantly reduce network load and latency in addition to the qualitative benefits of simplified operations, appropriate prioritization and security. This material is an extension to the original paper that describes the extended features and more detailed evaluation preparation and results.

Jiachen Chen

Papers

COPSS: An Efficient Content Oriented Publish/Subscribe System

Exploiting ICN for flexible management of software-defined networks

Comparison of naming schema in ICN

G-COPSS: A Content Centric Communication Infrastructure for Gaming Applications

CNS: Content-oriented Notification Service for Managing Disasters (Extended Materials)