Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Multimedia applications and services continue to play a crucial role in daily and business life. They have evolved from predefined to on-demand provisioning. Cloud computing paradigm and different network infrastructures have been identified as promising candidates to support this on-demand service vision. Cloud computing provides infrastructure, platform and software as a service to ease consolidation and sharing of resources (software and hardware resources) by different applications while reducing cost and speeding time to market for new services. Several network infrastructures have been identified as promising candidates to support this on-demand service vision. Virtualizing these infrastructures improves the system scalability, simplifies software upgrade, eases the implementation of security and reduces the cost of Capital Expenditure and Operating Expense. However, defining and validating mechanisms that enable dynamic resource management over network function virtualization infrastructures, while meeting the requirements of different entities (Consumers, platform providers and infrastructure providers) remain a big challenge. The main objective of this proposal is to define and validate novel mechanisms (e.g., models, algorithms and methodologies) to support dynamic resource management for virtualized network functions through efficient and fine-grained resource provisioning while satisfying Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Unlike the existing solutions, these approaches will react to various dynamic virtualized network functions with no prior knowledge of their internal designs, and therefore will enable generic, efficient and flexible resource management. The proposed research activities will help reduce physical infrastructure cost, energy consumption and time to market for new application deployment; 2) adding more flexibility for network and service management; 3) offering an open service platform for multiple players and business roles. Moreover, dynamic and SLA-based resource management solutions for virtualized network functions will be implemented and deployed as proof-of-concept. *