Service Engineering (ICCLab & SPLab)

A Blog of the ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences

Month: March 2012

Philipp Aeschlimann

31. March 2012 / / 2 Comments

Philipp Aeschlimann is researcher at the ICCLab. His interests are coarsely ranging from data center consolidation, over infrastructure an service virtualization, to software defined networking for Cloud Computing.

In 2006, after awarded a degree in mechincal engineering, he started his professional career in the area of IT Services for various SME in the respective industry.

He then moved to the Technical University of Applied Science in Zurich, which meanwhile became part of ZHAW. For the past 3 years he was responsible for the university’s core IT infrastructure and services.

ESF COST Action IC0906

28. March 2012 / / 0 Comments

About WiNeMO

The Internet of the Future will incorporate a large number of autonomous wireless objects moving with diverse patterns and speeds while communicating via several radio interfaces. Examples of such objects may include humans, cars or unmanned aerial vehicles, with every object acting as a networking device generating, relaying and/or absorbing data. Achieving the Internet of the Future, will require global interoperability amongst objects/devices, not typically commonplace due to inherent features of today’s Internet. To overcome current shortcomings, a number of research challenges have to be addressed in the area of networking, including protocol engineering, development of applications and services, as well as realistic use-cases. The Action will increase the knowledge and coordinate research efforts of national and international projects in the area of Wireless Networking for Moving Objects (COST IC0906 WiNeMO). Its activity will foster wide dissemination of research results, serving as an internationally recognized reference point. This will be achieved through capacity building of WiNeMO stakeholders offering appropriate networking opportunities to Early Stage Researchers. Results will also be demonstrated through joint living labs and showcases for researchers, decision makers and public exhibitions.

The ICCLab and WiNeMO

The ICCLab is is part of the Management Committee of COST IC0906 WiNeMO.

The WiNeMO Consortium

WiNeMO gathers roughly 30 academic institutions in Europe. The full list of members can be found at the WiNeMO Consortium page.

WiNeMO Objectives

The main objective of WiNeMo is to advance the state-of-the-art concerning networking aspects of scenarios integrating moving objects of the most varied kinds, ranging from personal use devices to sensors, into the Internet of the Future. In particular, the Action will coordinate the development of new algorithms, techniques, protocols models and tools that will facilitate the integration of moving objects into pervasive and ambient communications. The Action will foster cooperation among researchers at European and global level by contributing to the coordination and defragmentation of research efforts across Europe in the area by creating an open forum for academia and industry. As a consequence, the Action will play a supporting role to European industry – including SMEs – and will enhance cooperation between industry and academia in the area of networking support for moving objects. The Action will seek active cooperation with existing COST Actions and foster relationships with external bodies such as Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF); Open Mobile Alliance (OMA); the Standardization and Radiocommunication Sectors of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU); European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). The establishment of links with international (e.g. FP7 programmes) and national research projects is deemed as an essential goal which will be proactively pursued throughout the Action’s lifetime.

WiNeMO is organized along its dimensions in respective work packages. They are listed below.

Working Group 1 :: Network Architectures

List of participants

Working Group 2 :: Protocol Engineering, cross-layering and cooperation

List of participants

Working Group 3 :: Applications and services

List of participants

Working Group 4 :: Use-cases, societal and economical aspects

List of participants

SIG on Intelligent Transportation Systems

FI-PPP

28. March 2012 / / 0 Comments

Source: The European Future Internet Public-Private Partnership

With over a billion users world-wide, the Internet is one of history’s great success stories. Its global, integrated communications infrastructures and service platforms underpin the fabric of the European economy and society. Yet today’s Internet was designed in the 1970s, for purposes that bear little resemblance to current and future usage scenarios. Mismatches between the original design goals and how the Internet is being used are beginning to hamper its potential. Many challenges in the areas of technology, business, society and governance will have to be overcome if the future development of the Internet is to sustain the networked society of tomorrow.

To answer these challenges, the European Commission has launched the Future Internet Public-Private Partnership Programme (FI-PPP). The main goal is to advance a shared vision for harmonised European-scale technology platforms and their implementation, as well as the integration and harmonisation of the relevant policy, legal, political and regulatory frameworks. As set forth in the Digital Agenda for Europe, these are considered to be prerequisites for realizing a European online Digital Single Market (DSM) and, more broadly, an inclusive knowledge society.

PROGRAMME AIMS:

  • Increase the effectiveness of business processes and infrastructures supporting applications in areas such as transport, health, and energy.
  • Derive innovative business models that strengthen the competitive position of European industry in sectors such as telecommunication, mobile devices, software and services, and content provision and media.

PROGRAMME APPROACH:

  • The FI-PPP follows an industry-driven, holistic approach encompassing R&D on network and communication infrastructures, devices, software, service and media technologies;
  • In parallel, it promotes their experimentation and validation in real application contexts, bringing together demand and supply and involving users early in the research lifecycle.
  • The new platform will thus be used by a range actors, in particular SMEs and Public Administrations, to validate the technologies in the context of smart applications and their ability to support «user driven» innovation schemes.
  • The map of planned Future Internet PPP Pilot sites

PROJECTS

  • CONCORD ENVIROFI FI-CONTENT fi-ware FInest finseny INFINITY Instant Mobility OUTSMART SafeCity Smart Agri-Food

EUROPEAN COMMISSION RESEARCH:

FI-PPP CONCORD

28. March 2012 / / 0 Comments

CONCORD is the Facilitation and Support action for the EU-funded Future Internet Public-Private Partnerships (FI PPP) programme. CONCORD supports the European Commission in implementing a coherent FI PPP programme in a way that makes it more than the sum of its 10 constituent projects. Concord proposes and coordinates cross-project activities. CONCORD advocates fair, open and inclusive processes for the supported parties to achieve commonly agreed—or sometimes divergent—goals. CONCORD advances an open and transparent decision-making mechanism and a collaborative environment, where all the projects are in a systematic manner contributing to, and accountable for, their contributions towards the success of the FI PPP programme as a whole. CONCORD facilitates knowledge transfer and co-creation across projects as well as with related external groups. It further supports the projects in developing guidelines related to standardisation, legal and policy frameworks, SME and user involvement and cross-project collaboration. CONCORD addresses the identified challenges and conflicting interest within the community neutrally through structured discussions and meetings. CONCORD seeks consensus and avoids dominance through set rules for participation and interactions. CONCORD focusses on future-oriented strategic planning for FI PPP and on bringing a valuable contribution via unbiased outsider attention to FI PPP structures and processes.

The ICCLab’s responsibility within CONCORD and thus the FI-PPP is to coordinate the Architecture Board, chaired by the Platform project Chief Architect (CA), and generally supported and managed by CONCORD. The AB is responsible for the technical alignment of FI-PPP activities. This task includes process facilitation as well as content contributions from a neutral perspective. The process facilitation role of CONCORD involves agenda preparation in support of the Chair, supporting the CA in technical moderation, overseeing that the Architecture Board meetings run smoothly and fairly for all FI-PPP Programme parties operationally, and follow up and progress monitoring of action items as well as the reporting to the Advisory Board, Steering Board and the Commission. CONCORD will keep track of the discussions and decisions in the form of structured minutes duly distributed. In terms of content contributions, the work includes keeping track on the general direction and progress of projects, focusing on the details of technical convergence. CONCORD also fills identified gaps as regards program level aspects, needs, requirement, synergies and opportunities. CONCORD will also orchestrate supporting and influencing activities around the Architecture Board including Programme objectives; policy, standardisation, open source and IPR issues; operational aspects for example in relation to trial infrastructures; and aspects related to sustainability and exploitation of technologies. The work will also include collaboration facilitation within the program and beyond the Architecture Board.

The second major task involves facilitation and definition of the overall FI-PPP vision articulation (the “what and why” of FI-PPP) and the continuous evolution of the relevant documents and different messages to different target audiences (participants, developers, policy makers, industry), along with FI-PPP’s mission (the role of FI-PPP in implementing the vision) and strategy (how the vision is to be implemented). This also involves defining together with all projects the strategy, mission and detailed objectives for the FI-PPP Programme, along with KPIs, and organization of regular consultation and assessment rounds.

CoordinatorAalto-Korkeakoulusaatio

Web site
http://www.fi-ppp.eu/concord/

Presentation

T-NOVA

28. March 2012 / / 0 Comments

Overview: Network Functions as-a-Service over Virtualised Infrastructures

Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) is an emerging concept. It refers to the migration of certain network functionalities, traditionally performed by hardware elements, to virtualized IT infrastructures, where they are deployed as software components. NFV leverages commodity servers and storage, including cloud platforms, to enable rapid deployment, reconfiguration and elastic scaling of network functionalities.

Network Function Virtualization Concept

With the aim of promoting the NFV concept, T-NOVA introduces a novel enabling framework, allowing operators not only to deploy virtualized Network Functions (NFs) for their own needs, but also to offer them to their customers, as value-added services. Virtual network appliances (gateways, proxies, firewalls, transcoders, analyzers etc.) can be provided on-demand as-a-Service, eliminating the need to acquire, install and maintain specialized hardware at customers’ premises.

High Level Architecture of T-Nova Platform

T-NOVA will design and implement a management/orchestration platform for the automated provision, configuration, monitoring and optimization of Network Functions-as-a-Service (NFaaS) over virtualised Network/IT infrastructures.

T-NOVA leverages and enhances cloud management architectures for the elastic provision and (re-) allocation of IT resources assigned to the hosting of Network Functions. It also exploits and extends Software Defined Networking platforms for efficient management of the network infrastructure.

Furthermore, in order to facilitate the involvement of diverse actors in the NFV scene and attract new market entrants, T-NOVA establishes a “NFV Marketplace”, where network services and functions by several developers can be published and brokered/traded. Via the Marketplace, customers can browse and select the services and virtual appliances which best match their needs, as well as negotiate the associated SLAs and be charged under various billing models.

T-Nova-Marketplace

More info here.

GEYSER

28. March 2012 / / 0 Comments

Despite many ongoing efforts on energy efficiency improvements in data centres, the lower energy consumption per data centre does not compensate the cumulative increasing energy demand, due to the combined action of increasing load density in the computer room and rising digitization of human activities. Hence data centres are consuming increasing amount of energy, with a significant negative impact on the environment (increased carbon emissions and global warming), and on power supply continuity. Large data centres have started taking initiatives to operate their cloud‐scale data centres with renewable energy due to the attractive in‐place incentive systems. As a concrete answer the GEYSER project aims to step well beyond today’s Green data centres sustainability efforts by researching and delivering an innovative conceptual and software framework aimed at improving and trading‐off local energy efficiency and carbon reduction footprint against a broader system‐level smart city energy efficiency, while maximizing the use of renewable energy.

GEYSER will originally combine real time smart synergistic IT infrastructure (computing, storage), cooling and power subsystems monitoring and control, with flexible supply/demand load and energy management within green energy‐led marketplaces and geographical renewable energy supply‐ aware load balancing. GEYSER future green data centres will be able to monitor, control, reuse and optimize their energy consumption and production, from renewable energy in particular, within the framework of a holistic representation of energy (either power or heat) and along the underway roadmap towards acting as energy prosumers.

The ICCLab will play a lead role in developing workload migration mechanisms which will not affect perceived customer experience.

GEYSER will be validated in two different operational urban data centres pilots, located in Italy and the Netherlands (Amsterdam), partially powered by renewable energy. Expected outcomes will be beyond‐SoTA values for energy efficiency metrics, i.e PUE below 1,20 and CUE and ERE improvement by 30% in average.

Screen Shot 2013-04-20 at 11.44.44

 

The consortium is composed of:

  • Engineering
  • Enel.si srl
  • Green IT Amsterdam
  • Stichting Academisch Rekencentrum Amsterdam (SARA)
  • ABB
  • Zurich University of Applied Sciences, ICCLab
  • SingularLogic S.A.
  • Wattics
  • RWTH
  • Technical University of CLuj Napoca

The InIT Cloud Lab Seed Project

28. March 2012 / / 0 Comments

The ICCLab project is the foundational seed project or our research lab. It designs, deploys, and operates the ICCLab cloud computing hard and software infrastructure and addresses important research aspects around automation and interoperability of cloud computing infrastructure and frameworks.

Hard and Software Infrastructure and Framworks

The framework of choice is OpenStack, which enjoys significant industry and academic support and is reaching good levels of maturity. The lab will support pre-production usage scenarios on top of OpenStack services as well as experimental research on OpenStack technology and extensions. Currently the actively deployed OpenStack services are the OpenStack compute service (including keystone, glance and nova), and Swift, an object storage service.

The lab is equipped with COTS computing units, each running on 8×2.4 Ghz Cores, 64GB RAM and 4×1TB local storage per unit. To store templates and other data the we run an additional 12TB NFS or iSCSI Storage which is connected to a switch with a 10Gbit Ethernet interface. The Computing Units are connected to a 1Gbit network for data and another 1Gbit net for control traffic.

At the heart of the CCLab is the Management Server, which provides an easy way to stage different setups for different OpenStack instances (productive, experimental, etc.). The Management Server provides a DHCP, PXE and NFS Server and some pre-configured processes which allow a bare metal computing unit to be provisioned automatically, using Foreman, and then have preassigned roles installed, using a combination of Foreman and Puppet. This provides a great deal of flexibility and support for different usage scenarios.

Research

One core concern with Cloud Computing addressed by the ICCLab seed project is Cloud interoperability and the ICCLab project is inparticular driving the OCCI standardization. A second, more operational concern is automation (deployment, configuration, scaling) of  cloud computing services. Details about these activities can be found under the research themes and blog space at this website.

In-depth treatments are documented in

Mobile Cloud Networking

28. March 2012 / / 2 Comments

Overview

Mobile and Cloud Computing are the two dominant transformations driving the IT industry in the recent and moreover, upcoming years.

Interestingly, both technology domains seem to be a natural match but no technologically firm and sound framework exists. This important and equally comprehensive problem statement is at the very core of the MobileCloud research theme.

We define MobileCloud as Mobile Devices + Mobile Network + Decentralised Computing + Smart Storage offered as One Service – On-Demand, Elastic and Pay-As-You-Go.

The top-level objectives of our MobileCloud research are

  • to develop a novel architectures and technologies, using proof-of-concept prototypes, to lead the way from current mobile frameworks (devices, networks, etc) to fully cloud-based mobile system, and
  • to extend cloud computing so as to support on-demand and elastic provisioning of novel mobile services.
  • to develop novel concepts for operational and business support systems that fully embrace the notion of MobileCloud

Research under our MobileCloud theme investigates, implements, and evaluates the technological foundations for MobileCloud systems. These systems will meet real-time performance needs, support efficient and elastic use and sharing of both mobile device, radio access, and mobile core network resources. Mobile network functionality will run on enhanced mobile cloud platforms leveraging commodity hardware. This requires extensions towards higher decentralization and enhancing those functionalities to elastically scale up and down based on load. The end-to-end control and management orchestrates infrastructure and services across several technological domains: device, wireless, mobile core and data centres, providing guaranteed end-to-end SLAs and AAA as well as service mobility. Ultimately, MobileCloud platforms will allow smart devices to seamlessly exploit the power of the cloud by offloading computational and storage load transparently for the user and at the same time consume all sorts of cloud services with guaranteed service and experienced quality.

Besides the technological aspects, MobileCloud research identifies and evaluates overarching novel business models that support the exploitation of the mobile cloud in various multi-stakeholder scenarios. MobileCloud architectures are evaluated in realistic scenarios and with a set of concrete use-cases, based on actual applications. These evaluations are done from diverse viewpoints, exploiting research in well-balanced and representative consortia, including leading industry from the telecommunication as well as the cloud computing segments.

MobileCloud Networking

Today the Telco industry fails to seize the vast commercial potential of cloud computing, and this, oddly enough, in view of the inherent reliance on communications for cloud access. Instead, cloud computing catalyses the pressure on networking.
Mobile Cloud Computing lacks an accepted definition. This poses a unique opportunity for Europe. The top-level objective of MobileCloud is to seize this opportunity. It will leverage on Europe‟s excellence in mobile communications and extend it into the cloud arena, which is almost exclusively in the hands of US companies. The MobileCloud Networking project will define and evaluate Europe‟s vision of mobile cloud computing. It will enable European Telco industry to take and sustain leadership in mobile cloud computing and thus a fundamental pillar of the Future Internet.

One issue is that cloud computing is an invention of the software industry and frequently not well understood by Telco experts. Meanwhile “cloud” is too often turned into a buzzword to prettify old ideas, which rightfully poses questions on any “cloud” proposal. It is therefore important to understand the distinct concepts, both technological and economical, of Cloud Computing in order to penetrate the innovative vision of MobileCloud Networking – which establishes a sound vision driven by technological concepts and business drivers – clearly beyond the combination of two buzzwords.

The top-level objectives of the MobileCloud Networking project are:

  • to develop a novel mobile “network” architecture and technologies, using proof-of-concept prototypes, to lead the way from current mobile networks to a fully cloud-based mobile communication system;
  • to extend cloud computing so as to support on-demand and elastic provisioning of novel mobile services.

MobileCloud Networking will investigate, implement, and evaluate the technological foundations for such a system. It will meet real-time performance needs, support efficient and elastic use and sharing of both radio access and mobile core network resources between operators. Mobile network functionalities – such as baseband unit processing, mobility management and QoS control – will run on the enhanced mobile cloud platform leveraging commodity hardware. This requires extensions towards higher decentralisation and enhancing those functionalities to elastically scale up and down based on load.
The end-to-end control and management orchestrates infrastructure and services across several technological domains: wireless, mobile core and data centres, providing guaranteed end-to-end SLAs and AAA as well as service mobility through the Follow-Me Cloud concept.

MCN_Architecture_DoW

Besides the technological aspects, MobileCloud Networking will identify and evaluate overarching novel business models that support the exploitation of the mobile cloud in various multi-stakeholder scenarios. The MobileCloud Networking architecture will be evaluated in realistic scenarios and with a set of concrete use-cases, based on applications such as mobile cloud enabled digital signage. The evaluation will be done from diverse viewpoints, exploiting the well-balanced and representative consortium, including leading industry from the telecommunication as well as the cloud computing segments.

MobileCloud Networking is a European research project funded by the European Commission. In total top-tier 19 partners from industry  and academia commit to jointly establish the vision of MobileCloud Networking over the period of 36 month. The total investment is roughly 16M Euro.

The project is coordinated by SAP and ZHAW is the technical leader.

Partners are France Telecom – Orange, British Telecom, Telecom Italia, Portugal Telecom Inovacao, NEC, Intel, ItalTel, CloudSigma, NextWorks, SoftTelecom, ONESource, University Twente, Technical University of Berlin, INOV – Technical University of Lisbon, University of Bern, and Fraunhofer.

MCNPartners

Quick Facts

Project Number: 318109
Project duration: 1-11-2012 / 31-10-2015
Project budget: 15.7 M-€ / 10.5 M-€ funding
Number of person/months: 1408 person months
ZHAW Project budget: 1.7 M-€ / 1.4 M-€ funding
ZHAW Number of person/months: 110 person months

More info here.