Walter Cerroni

University of Bologna | UNIBO · "Guglielmo Marconi" Department of Electrical, Electronic and Information Engineering - DEI

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) changed radically the way 5G networks will be deployed and services will be delivered to vertical applications (i.e., through dynamic chaining of virtualized functions deployed in distributed clouds to best address latency requirements). In this work, we present a service c...

The broad scope of the IEEE Communications Magazine Series on Network Softwarization and Management covers two aspects of communication networks that have become highly relevant nowadays. On one hand, network softwarization advocates for architectures where software and programmability aspects in the implementation of network functions, protocols,...

Fog Computing can facilitate the adoption of the Everything-as-a-Service paradigm in infrastructure segments that are located closer to the end user, or to the data source, compared to typical Cloud solutions. This enables combining the advantages of flexible service deployment models with the need to cope with the strict requirements – especially...

Welcome to the fourth installment of the IEEE Communications Magazine Series on Network Softwarization and Management. We are very excited to introduce this issue and write this first editorial as a new team of Series Editors. We start by expressing our sincere gratitude and appreciation to the past Series Editors, professors Alex Galis, Kohei Shio...

W elcome to the fourth installment of the IEEE Communications Magazine Series on Network Soft-warization and Management. We are very excited to introduce this issue and write this first editorial as a new team of Series Editors. We start by expressing our sincere gratitude and appreciation to the past Series Editors, professors Alex Galis, Kohei Sh...

The maturity of heterogeneous and hybrid public Cloud environments enables service providers to deploy there their complex IT services trusting these large and complex infrastructures. At the same time, evaluating the impact of changes at service configuration before and at the runtime is still a very challenging and difficult task. Moreover, a com...

Industrial IoT coupled with emerging cloud computing architectures shows high potential in transforming the way industrial processes are managed and carried out. This potential can be further enhanced by enabling on-demand deployment of IoT services located very close to the factory premises. This article proposes an architecture, based on the ETSI...

This series focuses on softwarization, management, and their integration in communication networks and services. “Network Softwarization” advocates for network architectures that separate the software implementing network functions, protocols and services from the hardware running them. “Network Management” aims to integrate fault, configuration, a...

Service deployment at the network edge is a promising area that has been studied recently in the literature. In this work we have investigated a Fog-as-a-Service scenario, where multiple Server Fog Nodes (SFNs) can serve multiple Client Fog Nodes (CFNs) by exploiting different service deployment models, i.e., SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS, in a flexible way...

This series focuses on softwarization, management, and their integration in communication networks and services. “Network Softwarization” advocates for network architectures that separate the software implementing network functions, protocols and services from the hardware running them. “Network Management” aims to integrate fault, configuration, a...

In the ongoing process of telecommunications systems softwarization, a key role is played by Virtual Network Functions deployed in Cloud environments and interconnected through Software Defined Networks. The separation between data, control and service logic changes the way in which those systems are designed, operated, and capitalized, and also en...

Due to the intrinsically inefficient service provisioning in traditional networks, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) keeps gaining attention from both industry and academia. By replacing the purpose-built, expensive, proprietary network equipment with software network functions consolidated on commodity hardware, NFV envisions a shift towards a...

The service function chaining paradigm links ordered service functions via network virtualization, in support of applications with severe network constraints. To provide wide-area (federated) virtual network services, a distributed architecture should orchestrate cooperating or competing processes to generate and maintain virtual paths hosting serv...

The articles in this special section focus on network softwarization and management. This renewed series focuses on softwarization, management, and their integration in communication networks and their services. “Network Softwarization” advocates for network architectures that separate the software implementing network functions, protocols and serv...

Low Power Wide Area Network technologies are used to interconnect a number of devices in a simple and efficient way. One of these technologies, LoRaWAN, is deemed as one of the most promising due to its capability to allow long range communications with very small energy consumption. LoRaWAN networks are managed by a network server implementing an...

The book gathers contributions presented at the 6th IEEE International Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft 2020) that was held as a virtual event. IEEE NetSoft 2020 addressing network softwarization technologies, Cloud, fog and edge infrastructures for 5G, network programmability and software-defined networking, abstraction and virtualiza...

Presents information and current topics of interest to the global communications industry.

The articles in this special section focus on telecommunications software, network virtualization, and software defined networks. (SDN) Network softwarization is changing how we build and operate communication networks. It is expected to enable the fifth-generation (5G) networks to provide logically-independent and fully programmable network slices...

Computer networks are in the Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) era. SDN brings a whole new set of flexibility and possibilities into the network. The data plane of forwarding devices can be programmed to provide functionality for any protocol, and to perform novel network testing, diagnostics, and troublesh...

By introducing rapid and innovative network functions, software-based networking and virtualization are fundamentally revamping how the communication infrastructures are designed, programmed and operated. Network slicing, mobile edge computing, new radio access networks, and programmable cloud-native services represent some of the key technical com...

Elastic Optical Network (EON) has emerged as a solution to manage different kinds of services, improving network scalability and efficiency. However, EONs tend to present differences in service performance due to the uneven bandwidth requirements. In addition, uneven network performance among routes with different hop counts is a known issue, affec...

The five articles in this special section focus on telecommunications software, network virtualization, and software defined networks. The increasingly relevant and transformational role that software and virtualization are gaining in the telecommunications field today enables unprecedented levels of abstraction, disaggregation, distribution, exten...

The book gathers contributions presented at the 5th IEEE International Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft 2019) in Paris, France. IEEE NetSoft 2019 analyzed how the continuous evolution of software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), and cloud networking techniques, which are now extended to edge and access...

The three articles in this special section focus on telecommunications software, network virtualization, and software defined networks. Software-based networking and virtualization are radically changing the way communication infrastructures are designed, programmed, integrated and operated, enabling rapid and innovative network functions and netwo...

The increasing number of devices and applications requesting external processing and storage facilities with reduced access latency has led to the introduction of edge computing solutions. Among others, Fog Computing can be considered as an edge computing solution enabling the edge devices to offer general-purpose processing and storage capabilitie...

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) are technologies that recently acquired a great momentum thanks to their promise of being a flexible and cost-effective solution for replacing hardware-based, vendor-dependent network middleboxes with software appliances running on general purpose hardware in the cloud. Del...

One of the main challenges in delivering end‐to‐end service chains across multiple software‐defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) domains is to achieve unified management and orchestration functions. A very critical aspect is the definition of an open, vendor‐agnostic, and interoperable northbound interface (NBI) that s...

For many applications with inter-datacenter Cloud deployments it is important to rely on an accurate model of delay times across different geolocations. Unfortunately, such a model is currently not available to researchers and practitioners. To fill that gap, this letter presents a thorough analysis of reallife latency values collected between diff...

This Feature Issue is based on extended revised versions of top-ranked papers presented at the Optical Networks and Systems Symposium and the Optical Wireless Communications Workshop that were held at the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC 2016). The papers appearing in this Feature Issue cover a wide range of topics, including vi...

This article reports a network functions virtualization proof of concept demonstrating the added value that dynamic software-defined networking control, coordinated with a flexible cloud management approach, brings to telco operators and service providers.

The emerging Network Function Virtualization (NFV) paradigm, coupled with the highly flexible and programmatic control of network devices offered by Software Defined Networking solutions, enables unprecedented levels of network virtualization that will definitely change the shape of future network architectures, where legacy telco central offices w...

The idea of pay-per-use computing incarnated by the cloud paradigm is gaining a lot of success, both for entertainment and business applications. As a consequence, the demand for computing, storage and communication resources to be deployed in data center infrastructures is increasing dramatically. This trend is fostering new forms of infrastructur...

Future network architectures will be completely reshaped by the emerging Network Function Virtualization (NFV) paradigm, and telco operators will likely deploy flexible infrastructures based on the cloud, offering programmable connectivity services and computing/storage facilities in the form of Virtual Data Centers (VDCs). This paper introduces an...

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is gaining a lot of interest as a flexible and cost-effective solution for replacing hardware-based, vendor-dependent middle boxes with software appliances running on general purpose hardware in the cloud. This approach provides an unprecedented degree of flexibility with respect to conventional traffic process...

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is gaining a lot of interest as a flexible and cost-effective solution for replacing hardware-based, vendor-dependent middle-boxes with software-based appliances running in a cloud-like network environment. The NFV paradigm is then fundamental to bring the required programmatic capabilities to 5G transport netw...

This paper presents performance evaluations and comparisons of different sharing approaches applied to the available optical bandwidth in data center networks. The recently proposed hybrid optical network concept, which combines multi-wavelength optical packet switching (OPS) and optical circuit switching (OCS) in WDM networks, is compared with a s...

This manuscript investigates the issue of implementing chains of network functions in a “softwarized” environment where edge network middle-boxes are replaced by software appliances running in virtual machines within a data center. The primary goal is to show that this approach allows space and time diversity in service chaining, with a higher degr...

The goal of Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDSs) is to protect against attacks by inspecting network traffic packets, for instance, looking for anomalies and signatures of known attacks. This paper illustrates an approach to attack detection that analyzes just the standard statistics automatically generated by the Simple Network Management P...

Optical switching technologies represent a promising solution for data center interconnection networks to support the increasing bandwidth requirements of current cloud-based applications, while reducing interconnection complexity and energy consumption. Furthermore, the heterogeneity of intra- and inter-data center traffic characteristics requires...

Today the performance of network services and devices is mainly assessed using Quality of Services (QoS) factors. These provide statistics about the quality of the network behavior but cannot accurately reflect how the unpredictable impairments which might occur in the network end up affecting the perception of the final beneficiary of these servic...

Cloud computing infrastructures will likely be a key component of future Internet architectures, owing to the many advantages of server and network virtualization, especially considering the emerging Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networking technologies. The cloud infrastruc-ture will then determine the performance of the net...

The increasing demand of computing, storage and communication resources by cloud-based applications is fostering new forms of infrastructure sharing such as cloud federations, which can take advantage of virtualization technologies and, in particular, of virtual machine live migration techniques. Such a scenario requires a quantitative characteriza...

In this paper the end-to-end TCP performance of a hybrid network composed of multiple Ethernet Passive Optical Networks (EPONs) in the access segment connected to the same edge node of a core network is evaluated. Three possible core network paradigms are considered: Optical Circuit Switching (OCS), Optical Burst Switching (OBS) and Optical Packet...

In this work we study the influence of the routing mechanisms when adopting a spectrum partitioning strategy in Flexible Optical Networks. Spectrum partitioning is considered because a complete sharing of the available spectrum cannot be implemented in the already deployed optical network. Spectrum partitioning allows the coexistence of different s...

This paper presents a simulation study of Named Data Networking (NDN) applied to vehicular communication in an urban environment. A detailed simulation of the urban mobility is provided and the study demonstrates the effectiveness of NDN to transfer messages thanks to the opportunistic multi-hop communication provided by the vehicular network.

In IP-over-wavelength divisionmultiplexing networks, a virtual topology is placed over the physical topology of the optical network. Given that a simple link failure or a node failure on the physical topology can cause a significant loss of information, an important challenge is to make the routing of the virtual topology on to the physical topolog...

Emerging network paradigms, such as Software Defined Networking and Network Function Virtualization, represent the key enablers for efficient and cost-effective deployment and management of cloud-based edge networks, where a number of cooperating virtual machines can implement the tasks traditionally performed by expensive and disrupting network mi...

Flexible optical network (FON) architectures are considered a very promising solution where spectrum resources are allocated within flexible frequency grids. These architectures must handle the spectrum more efficiently and must support on-demand elastic bandwidth provisioning. However, when multi-bandwidth services coexist without a suitable bandw...

Flexible optical network (FON) architectures are considered a very promising solution where spectrum resources are allocated within flexible frequency grids. These architectures must handle the spectrum more efficiently and must support on-demand elastic bandwidth provisioning. However, when multi-bandwidth services coexist without a suitable bandw...

The idea of computing utility incarnated by the cloud paradigm is gaining a lot of success, both for entertainment and business applications. The consequent increasing demand of computing, storage and communication resources within data centers is fostering new forms of infrastructure sharing such as cloud federations, which can take advantage of v...

In 2013, the IEEE Future Directions Committee (FDC) formed an SDN work group to explore the amount of interest in forming an IEEE Software-Defined Network (SDN) Community. To this end, a Workshop on “SDN for Future Networks and Services” (SDN4FNS’13) was organized in Trento, Italy (Nov. 11th-13th 2013). Following the results of the workshop, in thi...

Following the current evolution of virtualization techniques and software defined networking, edge networks might evolve towards a fully virtualized implementation by means of a number of virtual machines working cooperatively to perform the tasks of existing network middleboxes. In such a scenario the possibility to migrate groups of cooperating v...

Technology advances are making available huge amounts of processing, storage, networking capabilities at the edge (i.e., up to End-Users premises) of current networks. It is argued that these trends, coupled with new emerging paradigms such as Software Defined Networks, will impact deeply the evolution of future networks, allowing to design highly...

In this paper we present a test-bed implementation of an autonomic vehicular network infrastructure to configure and execute vehicular network services for All Electrical Vehicles (AEV). The manuscript reports a field experiment implementing the bridge between the AEV control network and the Internet as well as the signaling infrastructure which al...

This article addresses the potential impact of emerging technologies and solutions, such as software defined networking and network function virtualization, on carriers' network evolution. It is argued that standard hardware advances and these emerging paradigms can bring the most impactful disruption at the network's edge, enabling the deployment...

Circuit and packet switching convergence offers significant advantages in core networks to exploit their complementary characteristics in terms of flexibility, scalability and quality of service. This paper considers the possibility of unifying the two different types of transport using the Software Defined Networking (SDN) approach. The proposed a...

From the logical performance point of view elastic optical networks are multi-service circuit switched networks where bandwidth allocation has to be managed to guarantee fair performance to channels of different capacity. In this manuscript are discussed and investigated the implementation options for a trunk reservation policy aiming at solving un...

Cloud computing platforms are gaining increasing popularity in the new service provisioning scenarios. In particular, the Infra-structure-as-a-Service delivery model poses new network design challenges and demands for appropriate dimensioning tools. This paper presents a model, based on combinatorial analysis, for anycast service provisioning in in...

Data mining aims to extract from huge amount of data stochastic theories, called knowledge models, to explain or predict complex phenomenon. In this paper we propose new distributed data mining algorithms to recognize network attacks against a set of devices from statistic data generated locally by each device according to the standard Simple Netwo...

This paper describes an analytical model for a 3-level quality of service scheduling in hybrid optical networks. Three service profiles with different requirements are considered, namely: guaranteed transparent service, where packets are transparently forwarded into pre-established paths; real-time statistically multiplexed packet service, where re...

This paper investigates quality of service fairness in grid-less, multi-rate optical networks. By means of analytical modeling and simulation, results show that unfairness arises in absence of suitable control and that trunk reservation policies may solve the issue.

Future network architectures based on the emerging Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networking paradigms will significantly rely on cloud computing infrastructures, taking advantage of virtualization technologies. Performance of multi-tenant virtual networks will then be a key aspect to be considered when designing such cloud-ba...

This paper presents the experimental of a signaling infrastructure which can be successfully used to automatically configure vehicular network services.

The joint management of IT and network resources is a key aspect for dynamic inter-data center interconnection networks designed to work according to the cloud computing paradigm. Such a scenario calls for the anycast routing of service requests to find a data channel that best suits both connectivity and IT resource requirements. This paper presen...

This paper presents an analytical model to evaluate the performance of an optical wavelength-routed network for inter-and intra-data center interconnection, designed to work according to the cloud computing paradigm. Such a scenario calls for anycast routing of service requests to find a network path that best suits both connectivity and IT resourc...

This article describes the impact of a cognitive transport and resource management paradigm on the convergence of application and network services in next-generation networks. This is achieved by a new transport service layer implementing the functions needed by applications to automatically negotiate the network transport services. A testbed built...