Showing papers by "Sonia Fahmy published in 2016"

An empirical case for container-driven fine-grained VNF resource flexing

Abstract: In this paper, we make a case for using lightweight containers for fine-grained resource flexing for Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) to meet the demands of varying workloads. We quantitatively compare the VNF performance and infrastructure resource usage of three instantiations (bare metal, virtual machine, and container) of three selected VNFs. The three VNFs we experiment with are the Mobility Management Entity (MME) of the Evolved packet core (EPC) architecture for cellular networks, the Suricata multi-threaded Intrusion Detection System (IDS), and the Snort single-threaded IDS. Our results show that container-based instantiations not only incur lower resource usage but also have shorter boot time. This makes containers an attractive choice for fine-grained VNF resource flexing. The lessons learned from our empirical case studies with EPC and IDS provide important guidelines for building an elastic micro-service architecture for NFV deployments.

Feluda: Provenance-Enabled Diagnosis of Elusive Network Failures in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract: Sensor nodes are prone to failures due to their limited hardware capabilities, and software uncertainties stemming from erroneous logic or configuration. Such failures as well as wireless channel dynamics can degrade network performance, potentially creating network partitions. Existing troubleshooting tools either only diagnose a few problems or suffer from high overhead due to periodic transmission of control packets. In this paper, we propose Feluda, a system that exploits provenance, i.e., forwarding path of data packets, for automatic localization of problematic nodes and packets. Unlike existing methods, Feluda extracts necessary network performance metrics from packet headers and stores them into node flash storage, thereby reducing out-of-band packet transmissions. Once problematic nodes and corresponding packets are identified at the base station (BS), Feluda provides efficient querying mechanisms to retrieve packet headers of interest from specific nodes. Packet header analysis reveals the root cause of the problem. We implement Feluda using Java and ContikiOS on the BS and sensor nodes, respectively. Testbed experiments and COOJA simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of Feluda compared to the state-of the-art.