Application-oriented Networking through Virtualization and Service Composition

Future networks will face major challenges in accommodating emerging and future networked applications. These challenges include significant architecture and management issues pertaining to future networks. In this thesis, we study several of these challenges including issues such as configurability, application-awareness, rapid application-creation and deployment and scalable QoS management. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Application-Oriented Network (AON) architecture as a converged computing and communication network in which application providers are able to flexibly configure in-network resources on-demand. The resources in AON are virtualized and offered to the application providers through service-oriented approaches. To enable large-scale experimentation with future network architectures and applications, in the second part of this thesis, we present the Virtualized Application Networking Infrastructure (VANI) as a prototype of an Application-Oriented Network. VANI utilizes a service-oriented control and management plane that provides flexible and dynamic allocation, release, program and configuration of resources used for creating applications or performing network research experiments from layer three and up. Moreover, VANI resources allow development of network architectures that require a converged network of computing and communications resources such as in-network processing, storage and software and hardware-based reprogrammable resources. We also present a Distributed Ethernet Traffic Shaping (DETS) system used in bandwidth virtualization in VANI and designed to guarantee the send and receive Ethernet traffic rates in VANI, in a computing cluster or a datacenter. The third part of this thesis addresses the problem of scalable QoS and admission control in service-oriented environments where a limited number of instances of service components are shared among different application classes. We first use Markov Decision Processes to find optimal solutions to this problem. Next we present a scalable and distributed heuristic algorithm able to guarantee probability of successful completion of a composite application. The proposed algorithm does not assume a specific distribution type for services execution times and applications request inter-arrival times, and hence is suitable for systems with stationary or non-stationary request arrivals. We use simulations and experimental measurements to show the effectiveness of the proposed solutions and algorithms in various parts of this thesis.Ph