Section: New Results

Future networks and architectures

Participants : Adlen Ksentini, Yassine Hadjadj-Aoul, Jean-Michel Sanner.

SDN. We started an activity on Software Defined Networking (SDN), a recent idea proposed to handle network management problems. SDN are becoming an important issue with the ever-increasing network complexity. They are proposed as an alternative to the current architecture of the Internet, which cannot meet the supported services requirements such as Quality of Service/Experience (Qos/QoE), security and energy consumption. We particularly address the scalability issue by proposing in [70] an automated hierarchical controller-based architecture handling the whole control chain.

Mobile cloud. One of the 5G-architecture visions considers the usage of cloud to ease mobile networks evolution towards more flexibility and elasticity for handling resources; building the concept of carrier cloud. Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) represent the key enabler of carrier cloud. In [57] , we addressed the problem of Virtual Network Function (VNF) placement in the carrier cloud. Indeed, we proposed a placement solution that has two main design goals: i) minimizing path between users and their respective data anchor gateways and ii) optimizing their sessions? mobility. The two design goals effectively represent two conflicting objectives that we deal with considering the mobility features and service usage behavioral patterns of mobile users, in addition to the mobile operators? cost in terms of the total number of instantiated VNFs to build a Virtual Network Infrastructure (VNI). We modeled this problem using an optimization formulation having these conflicting objectives, and then used Bargaining Game to find the Pareto optimal solution. We are continuing our improvement to the Follow Me Cloud (FMC), which was devised by our team conjointly with NEC labs. In [33] , we proposed a FMC architecture that relies on PMIPv6 to handle mobility, and SDN to update the flow table of the anchor routers when a service has moved from one Data Center to another. In [10] and [32] , we addressed the challenge of flow table scalability problem, which may arise in FMC to high number of mobile users. To this aim, we proposed a two-level hierarchical SDN controllers architecture in order to distribute the SDN/OpenFlow control plane. Another objective of 5G is to reduce network latency to 1ms, which will ease computation offloading. Thus, it will be possible to run applications on UE device, even if the latter has low computation capability, by offloading part of the code to a remote server. In [44] , we were interested on studying the opportunities to offload part of one of the well known game engine in the literature, i.e. Unity 3D. We built a data set representing the CPU-GPU use of several games; allowing us to understand which modules might be offloaded to a remote server in the Mobile Cloud.