Virtual Infrastructures (VIs) emerged as a potential solution for network evolution and cloud services provisioning on the Internet. Deploying VIs, however, is still challenging mainly due to a rigid management of networking resources. By splitting control and data planes, Software-Defined Networks (SDN) enable custom and more flexible management, allowing for reducing data center usage, as well as providing mechanisms to guarantee bandwidth and latency control on switches and endpoints. However, reaping the benefits of SDN for VI embedding in cloud data centers is not trivial. Allocation frameworks require combined information from the control plan (e.g., isolation policies, flow identification) and data (e.g., storage capacity, flow table configuration) to find a suitable solution. In this context, the present work proposes a mixed integer programming formulation for the VI allocation problem that considers the main challenges regarding SDN-based cloud data centers. Some constraints are then relaxed resulting in a linear program, for which a heuristic is introduced. Experimental results of the mechanism, termed as QVIA-SDN, highlight that an SDN-aware allocation solution can reduce the data center usage and improve the quality-of-service perceived by hosted tenants.
Cloud computing is a service model that allows hosting and on demand distribution of computing resources all around the world, via Internet. Thus, cloud computing has become a successful paradigm that has been adopted and incorporated into virtually all major known IT companies (e.g., Google, Amazon, Microsoft). Based on this success, a large number of new companies were competitively created as providers of cloud computing services. This fact hindered the clients' ability to choose among those several cloud computing providers the most appropriate one to attend their requirements and computing needs. This work aims to specify a logical/mathematical multi-criteria scoring method able to select the most appropriate(s) cloud computing provider(s) to the user (customer), based on the analysis of performance indicator values desired by the customer and associated with every cloud computing provider that supports the demanded requirements. The method is a three stages algorithm that evaluates, scores, sorts and selects different cloud providers based on the utility of their performance indicators for each specific user of the method. An example of the method's usage is given in order to illustrate its operation.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.