Service Engineering (ICCLab & SPLab)

A Blog of the ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences

Tag: NFV

T-Nova final year demo and project review outcome

20. March 2017 / / 0 Comments

The ICCLab T-Nova members are back from the 3rd and final project review meeting that was held on March 16th in Athens, Greece. Couple of days before that, we were enrolled in the preparation and setup of the final demos at N.C.S.R. Demokritos premises.

Several demonstrations were shown to the reviewers during the demo session in order to point out the achievements in the last year of the project. Moreover a poster session was held in parallel to stress the contributions in terms of conference and journal papers published within the project’s scope, Figure 1.

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SESAME, Hurtle & NetFloc

21. July 2016 / / 0 Comments

Recently, at EUCNC’16, the ZHAW SESAME team demonstrated the work of combining SESAME concepts through the use of Hurtle, our orchestration framework, and Netfloc, our SDK for datacenter network programming. The demonstration was also a joint demonstration between SESAME and the 5GPPP COHERENT project.

It was a demonstration that bridges the gap between the telco and cloud world by creating a network service based on the services and technologies coming from both projects.

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Observations from 11th NGSDP Experts Talk

25. April 2016 / / 0 Comments

On 22nd April 2016 the 11th Experts Talk on Next Generation Service Delivery Platforms (NGSDP) was held at the Telekom Innovation Laboratories in Berlin. The purpose of the event is to bring together thought-leaders in the area of Next Generation Services to discuss the state of the art in the field. Continue reading

Orchestrating IMS – Project Clearwater on CloudStack using Heat and Hurtle

25. November 2015 / / 0 Comments

Project Clearwater is an open source implementation of IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) developed for scalable deployment in the cloud to provide voice, video and messaging services. There has been  work done before on orchestrating Clearwater in OpenStack using Cloudify. We, in cooperation with our partner – Citrix, present orchestration of this system in Apache CloudStack using OpenStack Heat with our recent plugin. Continue reading

ACeN Begins!

18. August 2015 / / 0 Comments

Recently the ICCLab, ZHAW acquired a KTI project, ACeN – Apache CloudStack for NFV. Cloudstack is one of the front running Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platforms for cloud environment. Leveraging Network-function virtualization (NFV) as the concept of replacing dedicated network hardware with a software providing the same network functions, increases network capabilities such as service availability in the cloud. This project has now commenced and the interaction between partners Citrix, Exoscale and ZHAW. Everyone is highly engaged already and from our  perspective we’re very excited to about this work.

The ACeN project will deliver services and prototypes based on the NFV standard and Apache CloudStack. A novel hybrid load-balancing service (HLBS) will be created and and key NFV demonstrators will be prototyped. It is hybrid as it combines IP address management and load balancing into one service/function. All will follow a common architectural approach, on common technology. This work will leverage and can enable access to a market worth up to $2.4 Billion by 2018.

The majority of outputs from the project will be made open source (under ASL 2.0), including the hybrid load balancing service. Much of the work in ACeN is exploiting the research work carried out in Mobile Cloud Networking and also the Hurtle orchestration framework.

From our lab’s perspective, this project demonstrates concretely our research approach of bringing foundational research and open source impact through an innovation transfer process to Swiss SMEs.

Stay tuned for more updates!

 

MCN and ICCLab Demo at EUCNC

27. July 2015 / / 0 Comments

As part of our on-going work in MobileCloud Networking the project demonstrated at this year’s EUCNC, held in a very warm (> 35*C !!!) Paris, France.

The MCN demonstration was built on top of a standard cloud infrastructure, leveraging key technologies of OpenStack and OpenShift and used (open source outputs of MCN, namely hurtle – the cloud orchestration framework of the ICCLab which is used throughout MCN to enable service delivery. Also demonstrated was the use of the ICCLab’s billing solution, Cyclops that is orchestrated using Hurtle. All of this delivers a NFV-compatible, on-demand, composed service instance.

The MobileCloud Networking (MCN) approach and architecture was demonstrated aiming to show new innovative revenue streams based on new service offerings and the optimisation of CAPEX/OPEX. Of particular note and focus, the work highlighted results of cloudifying the Radio Access Network (RAN) and delivering this capability as an on-demand service.

Supporting this focus was the composition of an end-to-end service (RAN, EPC, IMS, DNS, Monitoring & Billing) instance via the MCN dashboard. This demo service is standards compliant and features interoperable implementations of ETSI NFV, OCCI and 3GPP software.

 

OpenStack Summit – Deep Dive into Day 1

5. November 2014 / / 0 Comments
Towards a Self-Driving Infrastructure
With the increasing popularity of OpenStack, its imperative to have an easy process to deploy and maintain it. In this regard the researchers from Tsinghua University along with Huawei have developed a “Deployment as a Service” called Compass.
The talk described a use case of deploying about 200 VMs for a Big Data application with the main phases being installation and operation of the whole setup. The fundamental problem of operational knowledge not being transferred due to personal change was mentioned as  a main roadblock in projects like these and this is being tackled by the Compass project where the configuration steps have been reduced to bare minimum. The researchers from Huawei mentioned that the project was designed by keeping extensibility & automation as a main feature and also is independent of Openstack. The code has been opensourced and is in a stable state.
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Experience with OpenStack in Telco Infrastructure Transformation
With the wide spread adoption of NFV among the telcos, day 1 had an interesting panel discussion between the cloud vendors and the telco players which included Verizon, AT&T, Vodafone, Huawei & Mirantis. From a cloud vendor perspective, Mirantis had an opinion that the virual infrastructure manager like NFV enhances the agility of a carrier and as a follow up quick survey of the audience, many attendees were aware of NFV and its advantages. Telecom companies were more concerned with the service assurance and the impact of API change that sets in due to frequent update of the open source project like NFV. However both the parties agreed to open source model being the right way forward for standardization especially in the telecom domain.
Load Balancing as a Service v2.0 – Juno and Beyond 
 LBaaS extension allows the tenants load-balance their VMs traffic. For the Juno release cloud providers such as Rackspace, HP, etc. have partnered with the community and load balancer vendors  to redefine the load balancing as a service APIs (API v2.0) to address tenant needs. Load Balancing as a Service also enables adjusting of application resources to changing demands by scaling in and scaling out of the application resources.

MobileCloud Networking Live @ Globecomm

5. November 2014 / / 0 Comments

As part of the on-going work in MobileCloud Networking the project will demonstrate outputs of the project at this year’s Globecomm industry-track demonstrations. Globecomm is being held this year in Austin, Texas.

MobileCloud Networking (MCN) approach and architecture will be demonstrated aiming to show new innovative revenue streams based on new service offerings and the optimisation of CAPEX/OPEX. MCN is based on a service-oriented architecture that delivering end-to-end, composed services using cloud computing and SDN technologies. This architecture is NFV compatible but goes beyond NFV to bring new improvements. The demonstration includes real implementations of telco equipment as software and cloud infrastructure, providing a relevant view on how the new virtualised environment will be implemented.

For taking the advantage of the technologies offered by cloud computing today’s communication networks has to be re-designed and adapted to the new paradigm both as developing a comprehensive service enablement platform as well as through the appropriate softwarization of network components. Within the Mobile Cloud Networking project this new paradigm has been developed, and early results are already available to be exploited to the community. In particular this demonstration aims at deploying a Mobile Core Network on a cloud infrastructure and show the automated, elastic and flexible mechanism that are offered by such technologies for typical networking services. This demonstration aims at showing how a mobile core network can be instantiated on demand on top of a standard cloud infrastructure, leveraging key technologies of OpenStack and OpenShift.

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The scenario will be as following:

  1. A tenant (Enterprise End User (EEU), in MCN terminology) – may be an MVNO or an enterprise network – requests the instantiation of a mobile core network service instance via the dashboard of the MCN Service Manager – the the service front-end where tenants can come and request the automated creation of a service instance via API or user interface. In particular the deployment of such core network will be on top of a cloud hosted in Europe. At the end of the provisioning procedures, the mobile core network endpoints will be communicated to the EEU.
  2. The EEU will have the possibility to access the Web frontend of the Home Subscriber Server (HSS) and provision new subscribers. Those subscribers information will be used also for configuring the client device (in our case a laptop).
  3. The client device will send the attachment requests to the mobile core network and establish a connectivity service. Since at the moment of the demonstration the clients will be located in the USA, there will be a VPN connection to the eNodeB emulator through which the attachment request will be sent. At the end of the attachment procedure all the data traffic will be redirected to Europe. It will be possible to show that the public IPs assigned to the subscriber are part of the IP range of the European cloud testbed.
  4. The clients attached to the network will establish a call making use of the IP Multimedia Subsystem provided by the MVNO. During the call the MVNO administrator can open the Monitoring as a Service tool provided by the MCN platform and check the current situation of the services. For this two IMS clients will be installed on the demonstration device.
  5. At the end of the demonstration it will be possible to show that the MVNO can dispose the instantiated core network and release the resources which are not anymore necessary. After this operation the MVNO will receive a bill indicating the costs for running such virtualized core network.

It specifically includes:

  • An end-to-end Service Orchestrator, managing dynamically the deployment of a set of virtual networks and of a virtual telecom platform. The service is delivered from the radiohead all the way through the core network to service delivery of IMS services. The orchestration framework is developed on an open source framework available under the Apache 2.0 license and is where the ICCLab actively develops and contributes.
  • Interoperability is guaranteed throughout the stack through the adoption of telecommunication standards (3GPPP, TMForum) and cloud computing standards (OCCI).
  • A basic monitoring system for providing momentary capacity and triggers for virtual network infrastructure adaptations. This will be part of the orchestrated composition.
  • An accounting-billing system for providing cost and billing functions back to the tenant or the provisioned service instance. This will be part of the orchestrated composition.
  • A set of virtualised network functions:
  • A realistic implementation of a 3GPP IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) based on the open source OpenIMSCore
  • A realistic implementation of a virtual 3GPP EPC based on the Fraunhofer FOKUS OpenEPC toolkit,
  • An LTE emulation bases on the Fraunhofer FOKUS OpenEPC eNB implementation
  • Demonstration of IMS call establishment across the provisioned on-demand virtualised network functions.

Future Internet Assembly (FIA Athens 2014)

27. September 2013 / / 0 Comments

The 11th Future Internet Assembly  will take place from 18 to 20 March 2014 in Athens, Greece.

This year the focus will be on “Reshaping the Future Internet infrastructure for innovation”.

Open call has been launched to select the best  9 FIA working sessions for the conference, selecting the proposals that cover aspects related to:

  • The new Internet technological landscape based on network/cloud integration through Software Defined Networking (SDN),  Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), and innovative software and services that enable application innovation;
  • The contribution of  the EU National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) developments in the SDN/NFV domain;
  • The role of SDN/NFV in i) building Internet applications of major impact (e.g., social networks, open data, big data analysis, etc.) with virtual services capabilities; ii) enabling  the reduction in resources used (energy efficiency, reduction of raw-materials, etc….); iii) fostering the emergence of open platforms to create downstream markets for third party developers;
  • The EU Public-Private-Partnerships (PPPs) and how they are positioned relative to these developments and relevant requirements towards demonstration and test-beds in Europe/globally.

These sessions should:

  • Contain new and forward-looking ideas;
  • Feature a diverse array of presenters and experiences;
  • Introduce visionary ideas and practices which will inspire audience;
  • Promote cross cutting approaches and technologies to attract stakeholders and entrepreneurs;
  • Deliver best practices & creative approaches towards research and technological innovations;
  • Stimulate and provoke discussion.

The working session proposals can be submitted following the template available at https://osqa.eurescom.eu  by Tuesday, 15th October 2013.