Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad&nbsp;(IIT Palakkad or IIT PKD) is a public autonomous&nbsp;engineering&nbsp;and&nbsp;research&nbsp;institute located in&nbsp;Palakkad,&nbsp;Kerala. It was&nbsp;one of the five new&nbsp;IITs&nbsp;proposed in the&nbsp;2014 Union budget of India. The campus was inaugurated on 3 August 2015. The institute has 94 faculty, 978 students, and 63 non-teaching staffs.

IT Palakkad currently offers four-year Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) and two years MS programmes in 8 different engineering disciplines including&nbsp;Computer Science, Electrical, Mechanical, Civil among others.

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IIT Palakkad

In SDN-based networks, contextual understanding of network behaviour and safe execution of operational decisions are important as part of the network management process. Digital Twin Network (DTN) is a promising concept which creates a virtual twin of a live SDN-based network to monitor the network from different angles with various granularities and enables it to verify an operational change without disturbing the live one. However, modelling the arbitrary decisions by an SDN Controller to form a DTN and managing the contextual information in a DTN are challenging tasks in various aspects. This paper proposes a data representation based DTN architecture integrating Knowledge Graph (KG) for data modelling and storage and Template as the context description approach. The combination of KG and Template can make the DTN management scalable with the flexibility of defining the contextual information with the relationships between network entities. It also enables efficient querying of the data storage and provides the reusability of functions and data storage for the DTN applications development. The proposed DTN architecture was implemented using an ONOS-based SDN Controller and Neo4j-based KG with built-in DTN applications for practical use. The PoC implementation exhibited short query response time and high query throughput in reading from and updating a KG, though the initial creation of a KG incurs a considerable delay which increases with its size. © 2013 IEEE.

World University root node

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

IEEE Access

Building a Digital Twin Network of SDN Using Knowledge Graphs

Arrayed Waveguide Grating Router (AWGR) based optical networks are emerging as a promising solution for handling modern data centers due to their wide bandwidth, scalability, high data rates, and lower latency. However, link failures in AWGR based optical networks can significantly impact the network performance and lead to the loss of reachability due to the rigid, passive wavelength routing. In this paper, we present ResiConnect, a scalable, and resilient optical network architecture. ResiConnect is a 3-stage Clos network of AWGR, space switches, and AWGR (ASA) which is managed by a centralized controller. ResiConnect introduces an alternative path to redirect the affected traffic by vertically connecting transmitters, and incorporates an active link fault detection and the failover traffic steering. The evaluation results on various performance metrics confirm that ResiConnect is 1) resilient and scalable against multiple link faults, 2) efficient in detecting any link fault with minimum resource overhead, and 3) efficient in handling uneven traffic demand during link failure. © 2022 IEICE.

APNOMS 2022 - 23rd Asia-Pacific Network Operations and Management Symposium: Data-Driven Intelligent Management in the Era of beyond 5G

ResiConnect - Fault Detection and Resilience for Multi-Stage AWGR-based Optical Networks

Validation of network state of Network Function Virtualization Infrastructure (NFVI) under various uncertainties are of primary importance as they directly affect Service Function Chain (SFC) provisioning and its performance. SFC provisioning against the uncertainties, including variable traffic demand and failures of link and switch makes validation challenging because the number of scenarios to validate grows exponentially with the number of such failures. This letter takes advantage of a two-stage validation framework and proposes a validation strategy to verify the underlying NFVI network state that supports SFC provisioning despite various uncertainty in the network. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our strategy through different failure and SFC placement scenarios using realistic network topologies and traffic matrix. © 1997-2012 IEEE.

IEEE Communications Letters

Predicting Dynamic Network State of SFC Operation with Uncertainties

The static deployment of Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) introduces 1) significant degradation of Quality of Service (QoS), 2) inefficiency in the network and computing resource utilization, and 3) Network Function Virtualization (NFV)-based services with insufficient scalability, optimality, and flexibility. Caching VNFs is a promising solution to satisfy the dynamic demand to deploy a variety of VNFs and to maximize the performance as well as cost effectiveness. Although the concept of Content Delivery Network (CDN) is popular for efficiently caching and distributing contents, VNF deployment does not realize the benefit of CDN-based caching approaches. The challenges to caching VNFs are 1) to cover the large variety of VNFs and their properties, including the necessity of service chaining, and 2) to achieve high acceptance ratio given the limited availability of resources. This paper proposes Function Delivery Network (FDN), which is a cluster of distributed edge hypervisors for caching VNFs over a Software-Defined Network (SDN). The deployment and quality of the network function can be significantly improved by serving them closer to the end-users from the cached VNFs. FDN introduces a new strategy called Value-based caching that considers 1) the locality of reference and performance parameters of network and edge hypervisors together and 2) a partial deployment of service chains across multiple edge hypervisors for further efficient utilization of hypervisors resources. Evaluations on different patterns of input requests confirm thatValue-based caching introduces significant improvement on both QoS and resource utilization in NFV. © 2020 Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication, Engineers, IEICE. All rights reserved.

IEICE Transactions on Communications

FDN: Function delivery network-optimizing service chain deployment in nfv

In Software-Defined Networking (SDN), the importance of multi-controller operation is widely accepted mainly for 1) avoiding a single point of failure at the centralized SDN controller, and 2) scaling and load-balancing the control plane in large networks. Information exchange among SDN controllers is crucial for an end-to-end functioning of the routing and other applications like measurement and QoS. However, such information exchange introduces a scalability problem in the distributed architecture involving high communication overhead and long convergence time across the networks. The key concept of our solution against the problem is partitioning of the multi-controller SDN into the proper number of network chunks with the proper number of SDN controllers to operate in each chunk. This paper proposes VIBHAJAN, a control plane management mechanism 1) to find optimum groups of SDN controllers, 2) to isolate the information exchange within a logical boundary called Area, and 3) to enable information exchange between areas throughout the entire network. The implementation of VIBHAJAN currently facilitates a routing mechanism. The evaluation results show an approximate 50% reduction in communication overhead and 50% faster convergence compared to the broadcast-based multi-controller operation. Performance of the partitioning algorithm under different topologies is also shown. VIBHAJAN promises to facilitate a variety of network functions and applications over multi-controller SDN in a lightweight and scalable manner. © 2018 IEEE.

2018 IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networks, NFV-SDN 2018

VIBHAJAN: A Lightweight and Scalable Control Plane Management for Multi-Controller SDN

The vertical interplay among Edge-Fog-Cloud computing introduces a new requirement to accommodate services, network functions and chains of them in a heterogeneous environment. However, such operation involves challenging tasks including management of resource availability, compliance with Service Level Agreements (SLAs), dynamic re-configuration of services and networks across different computing domains. This paper proposes Dynamic Network Function (DNF) that involves 1) a tractable VNF placement algorithm, and 2) a bottleneck detection and removal algorithm for the heterogeneous computing and network environments representing the Edge-Fog-Cloud interplay. The proof of concept (PoC) implementation of DNF has been done using Docker-based NFV and SDN setups as well as a simulation setup for studying the DNF scalability. The evaluation results showed that DNF could achieve high acceptance ratio of SLA requests with reasonably short duration. The PoC implementation also exhibited the proper functions to 1) orchestrate the NFV and SDN, and 2) detect and mitigate the bottlenecks. © 2018 Association for Computing Machinery.

Asian Internet Engineering Conference, AINTEC 2018

Dynamic Network Function (DNF): Service chain placement and bottleneck removal for edge-fog-cloud interplay

In network function virtualization (NFV), the placement of the virtual network function (VNF) significantly affects the load on switches and the efficiency of bandwidth utilization. Suboptimal placement of VNFs in service chains increases the flow rules in the switches and the ping-pong traffic among the VNFs. This paper presents LightChain, an efficient polynomial run time approach for optimizing VNF placement and service chaining in NFV. LightChain forms the directed acyclic graph of the given service chains and applies topological sorting to the graph. The significance of the proposed approach is as follows: 1) The minimum hop-count in each service chain, 2) Reduction of flow rules on SDN switches, and 3) Elimination of ping-pong traffic. Evaluation results show that LightChain can determine the placement locations of the VNFs in a reasonably short time. Our comparison results with other approach show that LightChain installs a lower number of flow rules in the switches. © 2016 IEEE.