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

Network use has evolved to be dominated by content distribution and retrieval, while networking technology still speaks only of connections between hosts. Accessing content and services requires mapping from the what that users care about to the network's where. We present Content-Centric Networking (CCN) which treats content as a primitive - decoupling location from identity, security and access, and retrieving content by name. Using new approaches to routing named content, derived heavily from IP, we can simultaneously achieve scalability, security and performance. We implemented our architecture's basic features and demonstrate resilience and performance with secure file downloads and VoIP calls.

/pdf/networking-named-content-ymua8rkdmw.pdf

Networking named content

Current network use is dominated by content distribution and retrieval yet current networking protocols are designed for conversations between hosts. Accessing content and services requires mapping from the what that users care about to the network's where. We present Content-Centric Networking (CCN) which uses content chunks as a primitive---decoupling location from identity, security and access, and retrieving chunks of content by name. Using new approaches to routing named content, derived from IP, CCN simultaneously achieves scalability, security, and performance. We describe our implementation of the architecture's basic features and demonstrate its performance and resilience with secure file downloads and VoIP calls.

Together with an explosive growth of the mobile applications and emerging of cloud computing concept, mobile cloud computing (MCC) has been introduced to be a potential technology for mobile services. MCC integrates the cloud computing into the mobile environment and overcomes obstacles related to the performance (e.g., battery life, storage, and bandwidth), environment (e.g., heterogeneity, scalability, and availability), and security (e.g., reliability and privacy) discussed in mobile computing. This paper gives a survey of MCC, which helps general readers have an overview of the MCC including the definition, architecture, and applications. The issues, existing solutions, and approaches are presented. In addition, the future research directions of MCC are discussed. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A survey of mobile cloud computing: architecture, applications, and approaches

Matrix Factorization Techniques for Recommender Systems

Satellite imagery depicts the earth’s surface remotely and provides comprehensive information for many applications, such as land use monitoring and urban planning. Existing studies on unsupervised representation learning for satellite images only take into account the images’ geographic information, ignoring human activity factors. To bridge this gap, we propose using the Point-of-Interest (POI) data to capture human factors and designing a contrastive learning-based framework to consolidate the representation of satellite imagery with POI information. Besides, we introduce a season-invariant representation learning model on satellite imagery, considering that human factors are mostly unchanging with respect to seasons. An attention model is designed at last to merge the representations from the geographic, seasonal, and POI perspectives adaptively. On the basis of real-world datasets collected from Beijing1, we evaluate our method for predicting socioeconomic indicators. The results show that the representation containing POI information outperforms the geographic representation in estimating commercial activity-related indicators. Our proposed attentional framework can estimate the socioeconomic indicators with R2 of 0.874 and outperforms the baseline methods. Furthermore, we explore the differences in the representations of satellite images with varying socioeconomic statuses. Finally, we investigate the impact of geographic and POI perspective information in the representation learning process, as well as the effect of satellite imagery on various spatial resolutions.

/pdf/learning-representations-of-satellite-imagery-by-leveraging-3ddlvn9j.pdf

Learning Representations of Satellite Imagery by Leveraging Point-of-Interests

IR‐Style Document Dissemination in DHTs

Our homes, offices, and other spaces are expected to evolve into smart spaces served by devices having varying requirements and capabilities. To efficiently control and manage these devices, their controllers needs to be designed using the correct abstraction for the devices. In this paper, we present an abstraction for the devices in smart spaces, and we use this abstraction to present a 5D—deploy, discovery, decision, dissemination, and data—approach to control and manage smart spaces. We also discuss three approaches to design controllers for smart spaces, and highlight how controllers can leverage recent research in distributed systems. We believe that our abstraction for devices, our 5D approach, and our approaches for designing controllers are building blocks for transforming our spaces to smart spaces.

The 5D approach to control and manage smart spaces

Service liability interconnections among networked IT and IoT driven service organizations create potential channels for cascading service disruptions due to modern cybercrimes such as DDoS, APT, and ransomware attacks. The very recent Mirai DDoS and WannaCry ransomware attacks serve as famous examples of cyber-incidents that have caused catastrophic service disruptions worth billions of dollars across organizations around the globe. A natural question that arises in this context is: what is the likelihood of a cyber-blackout?, where the latter term is defined as the probability that all (or a major subset of) organizations in a service chain become dysfunctional in a certain manner due to a cyber-attack at some or all points in the chain. The answer to this question has major implications to risk management businesses such as cyber-insurance when it comes to designing policies by risk-averse insurers for providing coverage to clients in the aftermath of such catastrophic network events. In this paper, we investigate this question in general as a function of service chain networks and different loss distribution types. We1 show somewhat surprisingly (and discuss potential practical implications) that following a cyber-attack, the probability of a cyber-blackout and the increase in total service-related monetary losses across all organizations, due to the effect of (a) network interconnections, and (b) a wide range of loss distributions, are mostly very small, regardless of the network structure the primary rationale behind the results being attributed to degrees of heterogeneity in wealth base among organizations, and Increasing Failure Rate (IFR) property of loss distributions.

/pdf/are-cyber-blackouts-in-service-networks-likely-implications-xzn2afk66k.pdf

Are cyber-blackouts in service networks likely?: implications for cyber risk management

Offering seamless connectivity to devices capable of simultaneously using multiple communication interfaces continues to be a hard problem. This problem is important for edge computing because edge services may be available only on a subset of networks to which the device is capable of connecting to. We argue that various aspects of this problem can be addressed by leveraging the current trends of using user space libraries for networking, and allowing control plane negotiations between user devices and networks.

/pdf/poster-user-space-networking-libraries-control-plane-180qdxl4zd.pdf

Sasu Tarkoma

Papers

Learning Representations of Satellite Imagery by Leveraging Point-of-Interests

IR‐Style Document Dissemination in DHTs

The 5D approach to control and manage smart spaces

Are cyber-blackouts in service networks likely?: implications for cyber risk management

Poster: User-space Networking Libraries & Control Plane Negotiations for Seamless Multi-connectivity