Miami (Florida, US) will host the 2nd IEEE International Workshop on Management of Emerging Networks and Services MENS 2010, in conjuction with the IEEE Globecom 2010 conference. The presence and participation of the Network Technologies Cluster in the global event is ensured, since the paper entitled An Analytical Model of the Service Provisioning Time within the Harmony Network Service Plane has been accepted for publication. Check out session MENS 03: Management of P2P Networks and Ad-hoc Networks in the workshop programme.
The Harmony system, developed within the EU IST-FP6 Phosphorus project, is a multi-domain network resource broker that defines an extra service plane in order to unify the underlying network management systems and supports advance reservation capabilities to utilize the available capacity and network resources in an efficient manner. The service plane consists of at least one inter-domain broker and one adapter for the corresponding network resource provisioning system, although typically several entities populate the extra layer. Thus, the service plane may be deployed using different topologies, considering the specific needs and requirements of each scenario.
Harmony NSP supported deployment topologies
In general, the topology of a network seriously affects its reliability, throughput, or even traffic patters. Likewise, the topology of the Harmony service plane directly influences the reliability, performance, and scalability of the plane itself. Thus, an inadequate choice of the service plane deployment model may lead to non desirable situations where lower layers are underperforming. The manuscript submitted aims at evaluating, studying, and proposing an analytical model of the service provisioning time for the different supported architectures.
The key contribution of the work consists of providing a methodology to analyze the scalability of a given service plane topology as a function of the involved transport domains and helping to construct a foundation for further network research and developments in the field of resource co-allocation and generic network service interfaces in heterogeneous environments.
Harmony test-bed
The results obtained from the analytical model have been validated using a virtual network provided by the EU FP7 Federica project. The resources from the virtualised testbed has enabled the Harmony NSP to be further analyzed and compared to theoretical models. The topologies built on top of the slice, containing more than 50 entities populating the NSP, would have been impossible to test in real environments, with real data planes, due to the lack of such big deployments. The performed test cases have produced measurements that helped us to better understand and characterize the performance and scalability of the developed system under higher loads than the ones used in the test-bed available in the Phosphorus project.
Service processing time as a function of the hierarchical levels in the service plane
Internal IDB processing times
Path finding processing time comparison as a function of the involved domains
The work has been done by Jordi Ferrer Riera, Joan A. García-Espín, and Sergi Figuerola from the network technologies cluster in conjunction with Alexander Willner, from the University of Bonn, and Marc De Leenheer and Chris Develder from IBBT – University of Ghent. Chris Develder will be at Miami presenting the work done, so ask him about more details during the presentation day.
See you all there!
