Grant: Research Tools and Instruments

The requested equipment represents all the basic components of an intelligent data-driven networked virtual infrastructure testbed. The equipment used can be adapted to mimic the behavior of different connected devices and digital services that generate varying traffic types at varying volumes and velocities. The resulting research will be representative of real-world scenarios with the achieved results providing a realistic view of the potential and capabilities of the proposed orchestration, management, and security frameworks. In what follows, we briefly discuss the general motivation of the research program and describe the projects that will benefit from the requested equipment. Recent years have seen significant growth in high-bandwidth network connectivity demand. As network capacity greatly depends on the underlying network infrastructure, significant upgrades must be made to meet the growing demand. However, from a Network Service Providers (NSPs) perspective, the capital investment required to make such upgrades is not ideal due to the low rate of return. Therefore, NSPs worldwide have turned towards Network Virtualization, a technology that can transform a static hardware-based network into a dynamic and robust software-based network. This conversion gives NSPs the freedom to move away from proprietary function-dependent hardware and the ability to reduce their capital expenditures by up to 88%. However, many challenges must be addressed to harness the full potential of this disruptive technology. First, the underlying virtual infrastructure must be optimized to ensure its capability to meet both the growing demand and the changing digital service landscape. Then, the optimization of the digital services running on the optimized virtual infrastructure must be considered. In addition to the performance requirements, Information Security remains the challenge with highest risk for NSPs as well as being the clients' main concern and adoption obstacle. For example, Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks have increased with the adoption of virtual infrastructure and digital services as the first quarter of 2019 saw an 84 percent increase in DDoS attacks over the previous year. This research project aims to adopt a two-pronged data-based networking approach through the optimization of both the underlying virtual infrastructure and the overlaying digital services. To that end, the first objective is to develop new QoS-aware and intelligent frameworks for virtual infrastructure management that maintain QoS requirements, adhere to NSPs objectives, and offer resilient failure recovery methods. The second objective is to design QoS-aware and secure frameworks for digital services overlaying the virtual infrastructure by developing novel digital service optimization, management, and security frameworks using mathematical and ML-based models.