Research

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22 pages, 3576 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Efficient Placement of Service Function Chains in Cloud Computing Environments

by Marwa A. Abdelaal, Gamal A. Ebrahim and Wagdy R. Anis

Electronics 2021, 10(3), 323; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10030323 - 30 Jan 2021

Cited by 16 | Viewed by 2904

The widespread adoption of network function virtualization (NFV) leads to providing network services through a chain of virtual network functions (VNFs). This architecture is called service function chain (SFC), which can be hosted on top of commodity servers and switches located at the [...] Read more.

The widespread adoption of network function virtualization (NFV) leads to providing network services through a chain of virtual network functions (VNFs). This architecture is called service function chain (SFC), which can be hosted on top of commodity servers and switches located at the cloud. Meanwhile, software-defined networking (SDN) can be utilized to manage VNFs to handle traffic flows through SFC. One of the most critical issues that needs to be addressed in NFV is VNF placement that optimizes physical link bandwidth consumption. Moreover, deploying SFCs enables service providers to consider different goals, such as minimizing the overall cost and service response time. In this paper, a novel approach for the VNF placement problem for SFCs, called virtual network functions and their replica placement (VNFRP), is introduced. It tries to achieve load balancing over the core links while considering multiple resource constraints. Hence, the VNF placement problem is first formulated as an integer linear programming (ILP) optimization problem, aiming to minimize link bandwidth consumption, energy consumption, and SFC placement cost. Then, a heuristic algorithm is proposed to find a near-optimal solution for this optimization problem. Simulation studies are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. The simulation results show that VNFRP can significantly improve load balancing by 80% when the number of replicas is increased. Additionally, VNFRP provides more than a 54% reduction in network energy consumption. Furthermore, it can efficiently reduce the SFC placement cost by more than 67%. Moreover, with the advantages of a fast response time and rapid convergence, VNFRP can be considered as a scalable solution for large networking environments. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Cloud Computing and Applications)

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28 pages, 4576 KiB

Open AccessArticle

I/O Strength-Aware Credit Scheduler for Virtualized Environments

by Jaehak Lee and Heonchang Yu

Electronics 2020, 9(12), 2107; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics9122107 - 10 Dec 2020

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2896

Abstract

With the evolution of cloud technology, the number of user applications is increasing, and computational workloads are becoming increasingly diverse and unpredictable. However, cloud data centers still exhibit a low I/O performance because of the scheduling policies employed, which are based on the [...] Read more.

With the evolution of cloud technology, the number of user applications is increasing, and computational workloads are becoming increasingly diverse and unpredictable. However, cloud data centers still exhibit a low I/O performance because of the scheduling policies employed, which are based on the degree of physical CPU (pCPU) occupancy. Notably, existing scheduling policies cannot guarantee good I/O performance because of the uncertainty of the extent of I/O occurrence and the lack of fine-grained workload classification. To overcome these limitations, we propose ISACS, an I/O strength-aware credit scheduler for virtualized environments. Based on the Credit2 scheduler, ISACS provides a fine-grained workload-aware scheduling technique to mitigate I/O performance degradation in virtualized environments. Further, ISACS uses the event channel mechanism in the virtualization architecture to expand the scope of the scheduling information area and measures the I/O strength of each virtual CPU (vCPU) in the run-queue. Then, ISACS allocates two types of virtual credits for all vCPUs in the run-queue to increase I/O performance and concurrently prevent CPU performance degradation. Finally, through I/O load balancing, ISACS prevents I/O-intensive vCPUs from becoming concentrated on specific cores. Our experiments show that compared with existing virtualization environments, ISACS provides a higher I/O performance with a negligible impact on CPU performance. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Cloud Computing and Applications)

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20 pages, 2222 KiB

Open AccessFeature PaperArticle

Overview of Architectural Alternatives for the Integration of ETSI MEC Environments from Different Administrative Domains

by Luis M. Contreras and Carlos J. Bernardos

Electronics 2020, 9(9), 1392; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics9091392 - 28 Aug 2020

Cited by 7 | Viewed by 4075

Abstract

Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) is proposed as a standard framework for the provision and consumption of applications and services in proximity to the end-users of network operators. Proximity has been identified as one of the enablers of the forthcoming 5G, where extreme low [...] Read more.

Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) is proposed as a standard framework for the provision and consumption of applications and services in proximity to the end-users of network operators. Proximity has been identified as one of the enablers of the forthcoming 5G, where extreme low latency and large bandwidth will be necessary for some services. However, the need of proximity imposes to network operators the necessity of huge investments in order to distribute computing capabilities towards the access. A less investment intensive approach would consist on sharing infrastructures by integrating MEC environments from different operators or providers. This could open the door to new business models on the one hand, as well as to avoid restrictions in terms of space, energy of regulation, on the other. This paper overviews different integration options by analyzing the MEC framework defined by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and identifying different architectural alternatives as well as the business and technical aspects that need to be taken into consideration for realizing such integration. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Cloud Computing and Applications)

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20 pages, 3314 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Dynamic OverCloud: Realizing Microservices-Based IoT-Cloud Service Composition over Multiple Clouds

by Jungsu Han, Sun Park and JongWon Kim

Electronics 2020, 9(6), 969; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics9060969 - 11 Jun 2020

Cited by 8 | Viewed by 3384

Abstract

With the expansion of cloud-leveraged Information and Communications Technology (ICT) convergence trend, cloud-native computing is starting to be the de-facto paradigm together with MSA(Microservices Architecture)-based service composition for agility and efficiency. Moreover, by bridging the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud together, a [...] Read more.

With the expansion of cloud-leveraged Information and Communications Technology (ICT) convergence trend, cloud-native computing is starting to be the de-facto paradigm together with MSA(Microservices Architecture)-based service composition for agility and efficiency. Moreover, by bridging the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud together, a variety of cloud applications are explosively emerging. As an example, the so-called IoT-Cloud services, which are cloud-leveraged inter-connected services with distributed IoT devices, dynamically utilize geographically-distributed multiple clouds since mobile IoT devices can selectively connect to the near-by cloud resources for low-latency and high-throughput connectivity. In comparison, most public cloud providers may cause vendor lock-in problems that limit the inter-operable service compositions. Thus, in this paper, we propose a new overlay approach to address the above limitations, denoted as Dynamic OverCloud, which is a specially-arranged razor-thin overlay layer that provides users with an inter-operable and visibility-supported environment for MSA-based IoT-Cloud service composition over the existing multiple clouds. Then, we design a software framework that dynamically builds the proposed concept. We also describe a detailed implementation of the software framework with workflows. Finally, we verify its feasibility by realizing a smart energy IoT-Cloud service with the suggested operation lifecycle. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Cloud Computing and Applications)

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22 pages, 4552 KiB

Open AccessArticle

K-ONE Playground: Reconfigurable Clusters for a Cloud-Native Testbed

by Jun-Sik Shin and JongWon Kim

Electronics 2020, 9(5), 844; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics9050844 - 20 May 2020

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2689

Abstract

Cloud-native computing with edge clouds is dominating the current computing paradigm. To prepare a flexible testbed for this paradigm, the build-out of K-ONE Playground started in 2015 based on the concept of SmartXPlayground. K-ONE Playground targets a multi-site edge cloud testbed based on [...] Read more.

Cloud-native computing with edge clouds is dominating the current computing paradigm. To prepare a flexible testbed for this paradigm, the build-out of K-ONE Playground started in 2015 based on the concept of SmartXPlayground. K-ONE Playground targets a multi-site edge cloud testbed based on the concept of composable playground that can flexibly compose physical, virtual, container resources from a resource pool to user-defined infrastructure. SmartX Playground should properly handle demanding requirements for a composable playground. In this paper, we propose a unique design of reconfigurable clusters, which can provide physical and virtual resources ready for cloud-native DevOps services. We also describe a detailed implementation of the reconfigurable cluster for the real-world infrastructure of K-ONE Playground. Finally, we verify its feasibility with operations and practical examples of cloud-native service development. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Cloud Computing and Applications)

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17 pages, 4919 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The High Performance of a Task Scheduling Algorithm Using Reference Queues for Cloud- Computing Data Centers

by Chin-Ling Chen, Mao-Lun Chiang and Chuan-Bi Lin

Electronics 2020, 9(2), 371; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics9020371 - 21 Feb 2020

Cited by 7 | Viewed by 5281

Abstract

As the network technology continues to grow at a high rate of speed, the traditional network topology is improved with novel distributed topologies such as the Cloud computing network. A cloud computing environment consists of a huge number of processors and memories, high-speed [...] Read more.

As the network technology continues to grow at a high rate of speed, the traditional network topology is improved with novel distributed topologies such as the Cloud computing network. A cloud computing environment consists of a huge number of processors and memories, high-speed networks, and various application services to provide a lot of services over the Internet for users. However, many services need to search for suitable service nodes, and the workload of each node can be unbalanced. Based on the reason above, the Reference Queue based Cloud Service Architecture (RQCSA) and Fitness Service Queue Selection Mechanism (FSQSM) are proposed to handle more tasks, lower the makespan and queue waiting time, and improve efficiency. Moreover, the tasks can be distributed more evenly to avoid overloading cluster managers and lower the efficiency of the system. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Cloud Computing and Applications)

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29 pages, 914 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Hierarchical Modeling and Analysis Framework for Availability and Security Quantification of IoT Infrastructures

by Tuan Anh Nguyen, Dugki Min and Eunmi Choi

Electronics 2020, 9(1), 155; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics9010155 - 14 Jan 2020

Cited by 19 | Viewed by 3551

Abstract

Modeling a complete Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure is crucial to assess its availability and security characteristics. However, modern IoT infrastructures often consist of a complex and heterogeneous architecture and thus taking into account both architecture and operative details of the IoT infrastructure [...] Read more.

Modeling a complete Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure is crucial to assess its availability and security characteristics. However, modern IoT infrastructures often consist of a complex and heterogeneous architecture and thus taking into account both architecture and operative details of the IoT infrastructure in a monolithic model is a challenge for system practitioners and developers. In that regard, we propose a hierarchical modeling framework for the availability and security quantification of IoT infrastructures in this paper. The modeling methodology is based on a hierarchical model of three levels including (i) reliability block diagram (RBD) at the top level to capture the overall architecture of the IoT infrastructure, (ii) fault tree (FT) at the middle level to elaborate system architectures of the member systems in the IoT infrastructure, and (iii) continuous time Markov chain (CTMC) at the bottom level to capture detailed operative states and transitions of the bottom subsystems in the IoT infrastructure. We consider a specific case-study of IoT smart factory infrastructure to demonstrate the feasibility of the modeling framework. The IoT smart factory infrastructure is composed of integrated cloud, fog, and edge computing paradigms. A complete hierarchical model of RBD, FT, and CTMC is developed. A variety of availability and security measures are computed and analyzed. The investigation of the case-study’s analysis results shows that more frequent failures in cloud cause more severe decreases of overall availability, while faster recovery of edge enhances the availability of the IoT smart factory infrastructure. On the other hand, the analysis results of the case-study also reveal that cloud servers’ virtual machine monitor (VMM) and virtual machine (VM), and fog server’s operating system (OS) are the most vulnerable components to cyber-security attack intensity. The proposed modeling and analysis framework coupled with further investigation on the analysis results in this study help develop and operate the IoT infrastructure in order to gain the highest values of availability and security measures and to provide development guidelines in decision-making processes in practice. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Cloud Computing and Applications)

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15 pages, 1416 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Bouncer: A Resource-Aware Admission Control Scheme for Cloud Services

by Aaqif Afzaal Abbasi, Mohammed A. A. Al-qaness, Mohamed Abd Elaziz, Hassan A. Khalil and Sunghwan Kim

Electronics 2019, 8(9), 928; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics8090928 - 24 Aug 2019

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 3237

Abstract

Cloud computing is a paradigm that ensures the flexible, convenient and on-demand provisioning of a shared pool of configurable network and computing resources. Its services can be offered by either private or public infrastructures, depending on who owns the operational infrastructure. Much research [...] Read more.

Cloud computing is a paradigm that ensures the flexible, convenient and on-demand provisioning of a shared pool of configurable network and computing resources. Its services can be offered by either private or public infrastructures, depending on who owns the operational infrastructure. Much research has been conducted to improve a cloud’s resource provisioning techniques. Unfortunately, sometimes an abrupt increase in the demand for cloud services results in resource shortages affecting both providers and consumers. This uncertainty of resource demands by users can lead to catastrophic failures of cloud systems, thus reducing the number of accepted service requests. In this paper, we present Bouncer—a workload admission control scheme for cloud services. Bouncer works by ensuring that cloud services do not exceed the cloud infrastructure’s threshold capacity. By adopting an application-aware approach, we implemented Bouncer on software-defined network (SDN) infrastructure. Furthermore, we conduct an extensive study to evaluate our framework’s performance. Our evaluation shows that Bouncer significantly outperforms the conventional service admission control schemes, which are still state of the art. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Cloud Computing and Applications)

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19 pages, 1194 KiB

Open AccessArticle

EPSim-C: A Parallel Epoch-Based Cycle-Accurate Microarchitecture Simulator Using Cloud Computing

by Minseong Kim, Seon Wook Kim and Youngsun Han

Electronics 2019, 8(6), 716; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics8060716 - 24 Jun 2019

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 3686

Abstract

Recently, computing platforms have been being configured on a large scale to satisfy the diverse requirements of emerging applications like big data and graph processing, neural network, speech recognition and so on. In these computing platforms, each computing node consists of a multicore, [...] Read more.

Recently, computing platforms have been being configured on a large scale to satisfy the diverse requirements of emerging applications like big data and graph processing, neural network, speech recognition and so on. In these computing platforms, each computing node consists of a multicore, an accelerator, and a complex memory hierarchy, which are connected to other nodes using a variety of high-performance networks. Up to now, researchers have been using cycle-accurate simulators to evaluate the performance of computer systems in detail. However, the execution of the simulators, which models modern computing architecture for multi-core, multi-node, datacenter, memory hierarchy, new memory, and new interconnection, is too slow and infeasible; since the architecture has become more complex today, the complexity of the simulator is rapidly increasing. Therefore, it is seriously challenging to employ them in the research and development of next-generation computer systems. To solve this problem, we previously presented EPSim (Epoch-based Simulator), which defines epochs that can be run independently by dividing the simulation run into several sections and executes them in parallel on a multicore platform, resulting in only the limited simulation speedup. In this paper, to overcome the computing resource limitations on multi-core platforms, we propose a novel EPSim-C (EPSim on Cloud) simulator that extends EPSim and achieves higher performance using a cloud computing platform. EPSim-C is designed to perform the epoch-based executions in a massively parallel fashion by using MapReduce on Hadoop-based systems. According to our experiments, we have achieved a maximum speed of 87.0× and an average speed of 46.1× using 256 cores. As far as we know, EPSim-C is the only existing way to accelerate the cycle-accurate simulator on cloud platforms; thus, our significant performance enhancement allows researchers to model and research current and future cutting-edge computing platforms using real workloads. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Cloud Computing and Applications)

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29 pages, 9114 KiB

Open AccessArticle

SHIYF: A Secured and High-Integrity YARN Framework

by Junyi Deng, Yanheng Liu, Jian Wang and Shujing Li

Electronics 2019, 8(5), 548; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics8050548 - 15 May 2019

Viewed by 2397

Abstract

Cloud computing is becoming a powerful parallel data processing method, and it can be adopted by many network service providers to build a service framework. Although cloud computing is able to efficiently process a large amount of data, it can be attacked easily [...] Read more.

Cloud computing is becoming a powerful parallel data processing method, and it can be adopted by many network service providers to build a service framework. Although cloud computing is able to efficiently process a large amount of data, it can be attacked easily due to its massively distributed cluster nodes. In this paper, we propose a secure and high-integrity YARN framework (SHIYF), which establishes a close relationship between speculative execution and the security of Yet Another Resource Negotiator (YARN, MapReduce 2.0). SHIYF computes and compares the MD5 hashes of the intermediate and final results in the MapReduce process by launching the speculative executions in a certain ratio, which is able to find actual and potentially malicious nodes in the Hadoop cluster. The prototype of SHIYF is implemented based on Hadoop 2.8.0. In this paper, theoretical derivations and experiments show that SHIYF not only guarantees the security and high integrity of the MapReduce process but also successfully locates the malicious nodes and the potential malicious ones in Hadoop, while increasing overhead slightly. Furthermore, the malicious node detection ratio is more than 87%. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Cloud Computing and Applications)

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24 pages, 10078 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Load Balancing Scheme for Effectively Supporting Distributed In-Memory Based Computing

by Kyoungsoo Bok, Kitae Choi, Dojin Choi, Jongtae Lim and Jaesoo Yoo

Electronics 2019, 8(5), 546; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics8050546 - 15 May 2019

Cited by 4 | Viewed by 2942

Abstract

As digital data have increased exponentially due to an increasing number of information channels that create and distribute the data, distributed in-memory systems were introduced to process big data in real-time. However, when the load is concentrated on a specific node in a [...] Read more.

As digital data have increased exponentially due to an increasing number of information channels that create and distribute the data, distributed in-memory systems were introduced to process big data in real-time. However, when the load is concentrated on a specific node in a distributed in-memory environment, the data access performance is degraded, resulting in an overall degradation in the processing performance. In this paper, we propose a new load balancing scheme that performs data migration or replication according to the loading status in heterogeneous distributed in-memory environments. The proposed scheme replicates hot data when the hot data occurs on the node where a load occurs. If the load of the node increases in the absence of hot data, the data is migrated through a hash space adjustment. In addition, when nodes are added or removed, data distribution is performed by adjusting the hash space with the adjacent nodes. The clients store the metadata of the hot data and reduce the access of the load balancer through periodic synchronization. It is confirmed through various performance evaluations that the proposed load balancing scheme improves the overall load balancing performance. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Cloud Computing and Applications)

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Review

Jump to: Research

30 pages, 554 KiB

Open AccessReview

Identification of Warning Situations in Road Using Cloud Computing Technologies and Sensors Available in Mobile Devices: A Systematic Review

by Ivan Miguel Pires and Nuno M. Garcia

Electronics 2020, 9(3), 416; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics9030416 - 29 Feb 2020

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 3144

Abstract

The use of mobile devices connected continuously to the cloud is increasing, and the development of a cloud-based solution may power the function of these devices in mobility. Several types of sensors available in the mobile devices may allow the acquisition of different [...] Read more.

The use of mobile devices connected continuously to the cloud is increasing, and the development of a cloud-based solution may power the function of these devices in mobility. Several types of sensors available in the mobile devices may allow the acquisition of different kinds of data, including inertial sensors, magnetic sensors, location sensors, acoustic sensors, and imaging sensors. The primary purpose of this study is to review the methods, features, and studies related to the identification of road conditions and warning situations. We performed systematic research to discover relevant studies written in English for the identification of different situations using the sensors available in the mobile devices, published between 2011 and 2019. After that, we analyzed the remaining studies to verify its reproducibility. The major part of the studies does not report the accuracy in the detection of warning situations. As future work, we intend to develop a system based on the Centre of Portugal for the detection of warning situations, road problems, and other issues verified during driving activities. As future work, we intend to develop a system using only a mobile device for the acquisition of sensors data in the centre of Portugal. We verified that the majority of the studies were performed in big lands, but in small areas, the number of accidents and road abnormalities is also high. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Cloud Computing and Applications)

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