Energy Efficiency and Quality of Service Guarantees for Cloud Services

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This discovery grant will explore the topics of Energy Efficiency and Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees in an Enhanced-Internet network which supports cloud services. The current Best-Effort Internet poses a challenge for cloud services, with its high packet loss rates, and its poor throughput, latency and energy-efficiency. Published reports indicate that the Best-Effort Internet and global data-centers use about 200 billion KW-hours of electricity per year, and that energy costs are about $14 billion US per year. The same reports indicate that these resources are lightly loaded with typically 20 to 30% loads, and that energy costs can be reduced by 70% (potentially by $10 billion US a year) through aggressive pursuit of better designs. This discovery grant will explore an Enhanced-Internet network using Software Defined Networking (SDN) technologies. The network will provide improved utilizations, energy efficiency and QoS guarantees for cloud services. The Enhanced-Internet combines several technologies; (i) a low-jitter QoS-aware router scheduling algorithm with improved bandwidth-efficiency, (ii) a new and improved routing algorithm for Cloud services, (iii) a new flow-based resource-reservation signaling protocol, and (iv) flow aggregation, to establish highly-efficient guaranteed-rate connections between data-centers. The SDN control plane can implement a Maximum-Flow Minimum-Energy routing algorithm to route the connections between data-centers with minimum energy requirements. According to my published papers, these techniques can achieve: (i) ‘essentially-perfect’ QoS guarantees with exceptionally low latencies for cloud services, (ii) essentially-perfect bandwidth-efficiency and resource utilization, and (iii) significantly improved system utilization and energy-efficiency. The concept of ‘Essentially-Perfect QoS’ is discussed in my paper entitled ‘Provisioning Mission-Critical Telerobotic Control Systems over Internet Backbone Networks with Essentially-Perfect QoS’, IEEE JSAC, June 2010 (and in my sample publication 4). A main objective of this discovery grant is to explore routing and scheduling algorithms, signalling protocols and the SDN control plane for anEnhanced-Internet. We will build an SDN testbed to demonstrate the Enhanced-Internet network. The Enhanced-Internet will (i) achieve improved QoS and energy-efficiency, (i) decrease the energy costs associated with inefficiencies significantly, and (ii) save industry several $ Billion per year. It has been stated that the Internet is ‘Ossified', i.e., metaphorically the Internet control plane is set in stone and unable to change. After years of seeing little improvement in the Best-Effort Internet, the international community has recently adopted the ‘OpenFlow’ protocol and ‘Software Defined Networking’ (SDN) as technologies which allow for a flexible Internet control plane. SDN decouples the Internet control plane from the switching/routing hardware, and provides a programmable control plane to researchers. This programmability allows researchers to implement new networking protocols on real routers/switches, providing unprecedented flexibility. Researchers are no longer constrained to use an approved IETF or IEEE standard. In 2010 the European Union initiated the 'Ofelia' project to include SDN routers in the Geant research network, which links major European centers such as CERN together (http://www.fp7-ofelia.eu). This discovery grant will explore algorithms for an ‘Enhanced-Internet’ network using Openflow and SDN technologies, it will construct a testbed to demonstrate an Enhanced-Internet with improved resource-utilization and QoS guarantees for Cloud services, and it will train students in SDN and Internet technologies.