From IoT to Cloud: A Network Function Virtualization end-to-end communication solution

在过去的几十年里，互联网一直是建设全球信息社会和引领经济增长的关键因素。云计算、网络功能虚拟化（NFV）、数据分析和物联网（IoT）等互联网技术的融合，为构建以服务为中心的未来互联网架构提供了必要的工具。未来的互联网预计将依赖于虚拟化技术，远离专用且昂贵的硬件中间件，而物联网将成为这种通信范式中数据生成的主要来源之一。然而，这种环境中的主要瓶颈是从专用硬件中间体迁移到软件解决方案时观察到的性能下降。通用服务器现在必须适应具有不同软件和硬件要求的广泛网络服务。与此同时，互联网的巨大成功也被证明是导致底层基础设施低效利用的最大障碍。物联网层产生的过多流量以及对新颖和更有针对性的网络服务的需求导致了可用物理资源的枯竭。因此，本提案的长期目标是建立一个可扩展的软件端到端解决方案，该解决方案将优雅地结合不同的技术，以提供具有高服务质量（QoS）和低通信成本的网络服务。这包括在现有物理基础设施之上创建虚拟网络覆盖，将物联网层与云互连。要实现这一点，首先我们需要找到托管虚拟化网络服务的服务器的最佳软件和硬件配置，以在吞吐量和延迟方面优化所获得的性能，从而提供具有成本效益和吸引力的解决方案。这将有助于解决使用软件网络解决方案时注意到的性能下降问题。其次，考虑到可用资源有限，特别是在网络边缘，提出适当的分配算法，以最小化业务的部署成本，进一步提高吞吐量和延迟性能。最后，数据分析将应用于物联网流量，以消除冗余数据并揭示流量模式，从而更好地协调网络设计和软件网络解决方案的资源规划，并改善所提供的服务。通过提供一个主要未来互联网技术将混合的网络范例，将为一个有前途但仍然模糊的通信模型的具体解决方案铺平道路，和谐地将理论和实践研究结合起来。此外，该计划将吸引博士和硕士学生，他们将接受最先进的研究课题和设备的培训，为加拿大的学术和工业工作场所准备高技能人才。

During the last decades, the Internet has been a key factor in building the global information society and leading economy growth. The mix of technologies in the Internet, such as Cloud Computing, Network Function Virtualization (NFV), Data Analytics, and Internet of Things (IoT), provides the necessary tools to build a service-centric Future Internet Architecture. Future Internet is expected to rely on virtualization technologies, moving away from dedicated and expensive hardware middleboxes, while IoT will be one of the main sources of data generation in this communication paradigm. However, the main bottleneck in such an environment is the performance degradation observed when moving from dedicated hardware middleboxes to softwarized solutions. General purpose servers must now accommodate a wide range of network services with different software and hardware requirements. At the same time, Internet's resounding success has also turned out to be the biggest obstacle leading to an inefficient utilization of the underlying infrastructure. The excessive amount of the generated traffic from the IoT layer and the need for novel and more targeted networking services has led to a depletion of the available physical resources. Thus, the long-term goal of this proposal is to establish a scalable softwarized end-to-end solution that will gracefully combine different technologies to provide networking services with high Quality of Service (QoS) and low communication cost. This includes the creation of virtual network overlays on top of the existing physical infrastructure that will interconnect the IoT layer with the Cloud. To achieve that, first we need to find the optimal software and hardware configuration of the servers that will host the virtualized network services to optimize the attained performance in terms of throughput and delay providing a cost efficient and attractive solution. This will help address the performance degradation noticed when using softwarized networking solutions. Secondly, taking into consideration the limited resources available, especially at the network edge, appropriate allocation algorithms will be proposed to minimize the deployment cost of the services and further improve the throughput and delay performance. Finally, data analytics will be applied to the IoT traffic to remove redundant data and unravel traffic patterns to better orchestrate the network design and resource planning of the softwarized networking solutions and improve the services delivered. By providing a network paradigm where the main Future Internet technologies will be intermixed will pave the way for concrete solutions to a promising but still vague communication model, harmonically combining theoretical and practical studies. Furthermore, the proposed program will engage PhD and MSc students that will be trained in state-of-the art research topics and equipment, preparing high-skilled personnel for the Canadian academic and industry workplace.