Resource monitoring in a Network Embedded Cloud : An extension to OSPF-TE

Abstract: The notions of "network embedded cloud", also known as a "network enabled cloud" or a "carrier cloud", is an emerging technology trend aiming to integrate network services while exploiting the on-demand nature of the cloud paradigm. A network embedded cloud is a distributed cloud environment where data centers are distributed at the edge of the operator's network. Distributing data centers or computing resources across the network introduces topological and geographical locality dependency. In the case of a network enabled cloud, in addition to the information regarding available processing, memory, and storage capacity, resource management requires information regarding the network's topology and available bandwidth on the links connecting the different nodes of the distributed cloud. This thesis project designed, implemented, and evaluated the use of open shortest path first with traffic engineering (OSPF-TE) for propagating the resource status in a network enabled cloud. The information carried over OSPF-TE are used for network-aware scheduling of virtual machines. In particular, OSPF-TE was extended to convey virtualization and processing related information to all the nodes in the network enabled cloud. Modeling, emulation, and analysis shows the proposed solution can provide the required data to a cloud management system by sending a data center's resources information in the form of new opaque link-state advertisement with a minimum interval of 5 seconds. In this case, each embedded data centers injects a maximum 38.4 bytes per second of additional traffic in to the network.<p>