Abstract-Recent natural disasters have revealed that emergency networks presently cannot disseminate the necessary disaster information, making it difficult to deploy and coordinate relief operations. These disasters have reinforced the knowledge that telecommunication networks constitute a critical infrastructure of our society, and the urgency in establishing protection mechanisms against disaster-based disruptions.Hence, it is important to have emergency networks able to maintain sustainable communication in disaster areas. Moreover, the network architecture should be designed so that network connectivity is maintained among nodes outside of the impacted area, while ensuring that services for costumers not in the affected area suffer minimal impact.As a first step towards achieving disaster resilience, the RE-CODIS project was formed, and its Working Group 1 members conducted a comprehensive literature survey on "strategies for communication networks to protect against large-scale natural disasters," which is summarized in this article.Index Terms-vulnerability, end-to-end resilience, natural disasters, disaster-based disruptions.

Data Centers (DC) used to support Cloud services often consist of tens of thousands of networked machines under a single roof. The significant capital outlay required to replicate such infrastructures constitutes a major obstacle to practical implementation and evaluation of research in this domain. Currently, most research into Cloud computing relies on either limited software simulation, or the use of a testbed environments with a handful of machines. The recent introduction of the Raspberry Pi, a low-cost, low-power single-board computer, has made the construction of a miniature Cloud DCs more affordable. In this paper, we present the Glasgow Raspberry Pi Cloud (PiCloud), a scale model of a DC composed of clusters of Raspberry Pi devices. The PiCloud emulates every layer of a Cloud stack, ranging from resource virtualisation to network behaviour, providing a full-featured Cloud Computing research and educational environment.

Abstract-Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging paradigm to logically centralize the network control plane and automate the configuration of individual network elements. At the same time, in Cloud Data Centers (DCs), even though network and server resources converge over the same infrastructure and typically under a single administrative entity, disjoint control mechanisms are used for their respective management.In this paper, we propose a unified server-network control mechanism for converged ICT environments. We present a SDNbased orchestration framework for live Virtual Machine (VM) management where server hypervisors exploit temporal network information to migrate VMs and minimize the network-wide communication cost of the resulting traffic dynamics. A prototype implementation is presented and Mininet is used to evaluate the impact of diverse orchestration algorithms.

Today's enterprise networks almost ubiquitously deploy middlebox services to improve in-network security and performance. Although virtualization of middleboxes attracts a significant attention, studies show that such implementations are still proprietary and deployed in a static manner at the boundaries of organisations, hindering open innovation.In this paper, we present an open framework to create, deploy and manage virtual network functions (NF)s in OpenFlowenabled networks. We exploit container-based NFs to achieve low performance overhead, fast deployment and high reusability missing from today's NFV deployments. Through an SDN northbound API, NFs can be instantiated, traffic can be steered through the desired policy chain and applications can raise notifications. We demonstrate the systems operation through the development of exemplar NFs from common Operating System utility binaries, and we show that container-based NFV improves function instantiation time by up to 68% over existing hypervisorbased alternatives, and scales to one hundred co-located NFs while incurring sub-millisecond latency.

Abstract-TCP suffers from incast collapse in data center networks when used with partition aggregate workloads due to inadequate congestion control parameters. This causes poor application performance by under-utilizing the network, and can be one of the limiting factors in low-latency, high-throughput environments. To resolve this, we present Omniscient TCP (OTCP), a Software Defined Networking (SDN) approach to compute environment-specific congestion control parameters based on centrally available network properties. Through experimental evaluation in Mininet, we show up to 12× and 31× reduction in Flow Completion Time (FCT) at the mean and 95 th percentile, an 8× FCT improvement on highly congested networks when combined with DCTCP [1], as well as improved fairness and reduced end-to-end latency.