Cloud computing has recently emerged as a new paradigm for hosting and delivering services over the Internet. Cloud computing is attractive to business owners as it eliminates the requirement for users to plan ahead for provisioning, and allows enterprises to start from the small and increase resources only when there is a rise in service demand. However, despite the fact that cloud computing offers huge opportunities to the IT industry, the development of cloud computing technology is currently at its infancy, with many issues still to be addressed. In this paper, we present a survey of cloud computing, highlighting its key concepts, architectural principles, state-of-the-art implementation as well as research challenges. The aim of this paper is to provide a better understanding of the design challenges of cloud computing and identify important research directions in this increasingly important area.

/pdf/cloud-computing-state-of-the-art-and-research-challenges-49ws7tdgj3.pdf

Cloud computing: state-of-the-art and research challenges

In the Hamadryas baboon, males are substantially larger than females. A troop of baboons is subdivided into a number of ‘one-male groups’, consisting of one adult male and one or more females with their young. The male prevents any of ‘his’ females from moving too far from him. Kummer (1971) performed the following experiment. Two males, A and B, previously unknown to each other, were placed in a large enclosure. Male A was free to move about the enclosure, but male B was shut in a small cage, from which he could observe A but not interfere. A female, unknown to both males, was then placed in the enclosure. Within 20 minutes male A had persuaded the female to accept his ownership. Male B was then released into the open enclosure. Instead of challenging male A , B avoided any contact, accepting A’s ownership.

Evolution and the Theory of Games

The current Internet architecture was founded upon a host-centric communication model, which was appropriate for coping with the needs of the early Internet users. Internet usage has evolved however, with most users mainly interested in accessing (vast amounts of) information, irrespective of its physical location. This paradigm shift in the usage model of the Internet, along with the pressing needs for, among others, better security and mobility support, has led researchers into considering a radical change to the Internet architecture. In this direction, we have witnessed many research efforts investigating Information-Centric Networking (ICN) as a foundation upon which the Future Internet can be built. Our main aims in this survey are: (a) to identify the core functionalities of ICN architectures, (b) to describe the key ICN proposals in a tutorial manner, highlighting the similarities and differences among them with respect to those core functionalities, and (c) to identify the key weaknesses of ICN proposals and to outline the main unresolved research challenges in this area of networking research.

A Survey of Information-Centric Networking Research

The shared nature of the network in today's multi-tenant datacenters implies that network performance for tenants can vary significantly. This applies to both production datacenters and cloud environments. Network performance variability hurts application performance which makes tenant costs unpredictable and causes provider revenue loss. Motivated by these factors, this paper makes the case for extending the tenant-provider interface to explicitly account for the network. We argue this can be achieved by providing tenants with a virtual network connecting their compute instances. To this effect, the key contribution of this paper is the design of virtual network abstractions that capture the trade-off between the performance guarantees offered to tenants, their costs and the provider revenue.To illustrate the feasibility of virtual networks, we develop Oktopus, a system that implements the proposed abstractions. Using realistic, large-scale simulations and an Oktopus deployment on a 25-node two-tier testbed, we demonstrate that the use of virtual networks yields significantly better and more predictable tenant performance. Further, using a simple pricing model, we find that the our abstractions can reduce tenant costs by up to 74% while maintaining provider revenue neutrality.

/pdf/towards-predictable-datacenter-networks-2tjainhyi5.pdf

Towards predictable datacenter networks

/pdf/reversibility-and-stochastic-networks-17kl9p5ino.pdf

Reversibility and Stochastic Networks

The scalability of modern data centers has become a practical concern and has attracted significant attention in recent years. In contrast to existing solutions that require changes in the network architecture and the routing protocols, this paper proposes using traffic-aware virtual machine (VM) placement to improve the network scalability. By optimizing the placement of VMs on host machines, traffic patterns among VMs can be better aligned with the communication distance between them, e.g. VMs with large mutual bandwidth usage are assigned to host machines in close proximity. We formulate the VM placement as an optimization problem and prove its hardness. We design a two-tier approximate algorithm that efficiently solves the VM placement problem for very large problem sizes. Given the significant difference in the traffic patterns seen in current data centers and the structural differences of the recently proposed data center architectures, we further conduct a comparative analysis on the impact of the traffic patterns and the network architectures on the potential performance gain of traffic-aware VM placement. We use traffic traces collected from production data centers to evaluate our proposed VM placement algorithm, and we show a significant performance improvement compared to existing general methods that do not take advantage of traffic patterns and data center network characteristics.

/pdf/improving-the-scalability-of-data-center-networks-with-2orx1c99p1.pdf

Improving the Scalability of Data Center Networks with Traffic-aware Virtual Machine Placement

A method, information processing system, and computer program product manage server placement of virtual machines in an operating environment. A mapping of each virtual machine in a plurality of virtual machines to at least one server in a set of servers is determined. The mapping substantially satisfies a set of primary constraints associated with the set of servers. A plurality of virtual machine clusters is created. Each virtual machine cluster includes a set of virtual machines from the plurality of virtual machines. A server placement of one virtual machine in a cluster is interchangeable with a server placement of another virtual machine in the same cluster while satisfying the set of primary constraints. A server placement of the set of virtual machines within each virtual machine on at least one mapped server is generated for each cluster. The server placement substantially satisfies a set of secondary constraints.

Placement of virtual machines based on server cost and network cost

The design of the Internet protocol stack, with IP at the waist of the hourglass, mandates that packet delivery is governed by the destination IP address. This design has enabled explosive growth of the wired Internet, but faces two basic issues when applied to mobile environments. First, many mobile networks, such as mobile ad-hoc networks, are infrastructure-free, while Internet protocols are generally built with infrastructure support in mind (e.g., DHCP servers to handle IP address assignments). Second, node mobility introduces a high degree of dynamics in node interconnectivity, which defeats conventional routing protocols, originally designed for wired networks. In this paper, we argue that mobile networks can be made more effective and efficient through Named Data Networking (NDN) [4] (aka CCN).

/pdf/ad-hoc-networking-via-named-data-1rl55ihqds.pdf

Ad hoc networking via named data

A system and method for instantiation of a virtual machine (VM) in a datacenter includes providing a network appliance in a location for listening to management information traffic. Indices are created for data center images in the network appliance. VM instantiation requests are intercepted in the network appliance. Locations from which blocks for the VM should be fetched based upon network cost are determined. VM image blocks are populated from the locations.

System and method for assisting virtual machine instantiation and migration

https://www.cs.ucla.edu/~lixia/papers/10CN-biosurvey.pdf

Vasileios Pappas

Papers

Improving the Scalability of Data Center Networks with Traffic-aware Virtual Machine Placement

Placement of virtual machines based on server cost and network cost

Ad hoc networking via named data

System and method for assisting virtual machine instantiation and migration

A taxonomy of biologically inspired research in computer networking