Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

As computation power, disk storage, and high-end network communication costs plummet, cloud computing has emerged to provide intuitive, utility-style access to vast pools of resources (compute, storage, networking, and software services). Such processing power is relatively affordable and readily available. We can confidently say that cloud computing is defining the Internet! Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a computer network architecture that offers a flexible means for configuring raw hardware networking infrastructures to support a wide range of dynamic service demands with fluctuating resource requirements. Virtualization is at the heart of SDN and is the key technology to move away from dedicated and expensive middleboxes to softwarized solutions. In particular, important network functions (e.g., firewalls, NAT, DNS cashing etc. ) can run on cheap off the shelve middleware (e.g., generic server grade computer motherboards) where they are implemented on virtual machines; such network functions are known as Virtual Network Functions(VNF). They can be orchestrated in a dynamic fashion and  data flows can be processed  through interconnected VNFs called Service Chains (SC).  Network slicing is a technique for resource provisioning in networks that has been recently applied to the mobile cloud; empowered by SDN and network function virtualization (NFV) gives rise to a  dynamic and robust approach for establishing and reconfiguring customized end-to-end logic networks that encapsulate dedicated and shared resources using raw networking infrastructure. Finally, data analytics techniques for processing and identifying trends  of traffic workloads will be crucial for next generation agile and self configurable clouds.  Currently the industry is witnessing a major migration towards SDN enabled cloud networking, which will impact a broad range of sectors including consumer communications/social networking, eCommerce, eHealth and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. As such, the impact of the SDN technology will have a long lasting effect on network users in the global market.    Getting services from the cloud, requires the designers/providers to have significant expertise, experience, and time to customise and configure resources that are assigned to a multitude of (not necessarily co-located) virtual machines/VNFs. Efficient and fair resource allocation and management in such a shared computing system is particularly challenging due to diverse types of available resources, highly fluctuating workload/user needs, heterogeneity in the resource capacities of servers, and placement constraints regarding which servers may be accessible by a pool of users. The goal of the proposed research program is to investigate the fair and efficient resource allocation/management and dynamic network slicing, in conjunction with data analytics for maintaining the quality of offered services in the emerging SDN enabled (mobile) cloud architectures.