Cloud applications heavily rely on the network communication infrastructure, whose stability and latency directly affect the quality of experience. As mobile devices need to rapidly retrieve data from the cloud, it becomes an extremely important goal to deliver the lowest possible access latency at the best reliability. In this paper, we specify a cloud access overlay protocol architecture to improve the cloud access performance in distributed data-center (DC) cloud fabrics. We explore how linking virtual machine (VM) mobility and routing to user mobility can compensate performance decrease due to increased user-cloud network distance, by building an online cloud scheduling solution to optimally switch VM routing locators and to relocate VMs across DC sites, as a function of user-DC overlay network states. We evaluate our solution: 1) on a real distributed DC testbed spanning all of France, showing that we can grant a very high transfer time gain and 2) by emulating the situation of Internet service providers (ISPs) and over-the-top (OTT) cloud providers, exploiting thousands of real France-wide user displacement traces, finding a median throughput gain from 30% for OTT scenarii to 40% for ISP scenarii, the large majority of this gain being granted by adaptive VM mobility.

Nowadays, the explosion of cloud-based applications is leading to a much higher demand on both computing and network infrastructure resources than only a few years ago. Enhancing the user experience, by reducing the latency and increasing network stability, becomes an important challenge for cloud operators. In this paper, we propose a unified protocol architecture, based on the Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) and the Transparent Interconnection of a Lots of Links (TRILL) protocol, to enhance the access performance and to minimize the retrieval latency for services hosted in a distributed data center (DC) fabric. LISP is used as a cloud access overlay protocol, while TRILL is used as a geo-distributed DC virtual network overlay protocol. We specify and design a cross-layer protocol agent able to map virtual network embedding information from TRILL (layer 2) to LISP (layer 3) in order to allow cloud providers to let the client access the cloud by the best DC entry point, assuming that the inter-DC site latency dominates over the DC access latency. We tested our architecture in a real testbed. We compared the proposed solution to the legacy situation, highlighting the achievable gains in cloud access latency.

In spite of their rapid growth, cloud applications still heavily rely on the network communication infrastructure, whose stability and latency directly affect the quality of experience. In fact, as mobile devices need to rapidly get real-time information and files from the cloud, it becomes an extremely important factor for cloud providers to deliver a better user experience. In this paper, we specify a cloud access overlay protocol architecture, based on traffic engineering extensions of the Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP), to improve the access performance for Cloud services delivered by a distributed data center fabric. The distributed fabric offers the possibility to access the services through multiple routing locators and to migrate server virtual machines (VMs) to different locations improving access performance. We address the problem of jointly switching VM routing locators and migrating VMs across data-center sites. We propose an adaptive control framework that allows satisfying agreed-upon levels of quality of service. We evaluate the architecture on a real distributed data-center network, involving four distant LISP-enabled data-center sites in France, as compared to legacy situations with no Cloud access optimization. By emulating realistic situations we show that, by only switching the data-center routing locator, we can guarantee a better user experience with a transfer time decreased by 80%. Moreover, we show that, to react to situations when the Cloud access link between sites is disrupted or suffers excessively from packet loss, the adaptive VM migration policy can further decrease the transfer time by 40%.

Nowadays, the rapid growth of Cloud computing services is stressing the network communication infrastructure in terms of resiliency and programmability. This evolution reveals missing blocks of the current Internet Protocol architecture, in particular in terms of virtual machine mobility management for addressing and locator-identifier mapping. In this paper, we propose some changes to the Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) to cope with this gap. We define novel control-plane functions and evaluate them exhaustively in the worldwide public LISP testbed, involving five LISP sites distant from a few hundred kilometers to many thousands kilometers. Our results show that we can guarantee service downtime upon live virtual machine migration lower than a second across American, Asian and European LISP sites, and down to 300 ms within Europe, outperforming standard LISP and legacy triangular routing approaches in terms of service downtime, as a function of datacenter-datacenter and client-datacenter distances.

Cloud networking imposes new requirements in terms of connection resiliency and throughput among virtual machines, hypervisors and users. A promising direction is to exploit multipath communications, yet existing protocols have a so limited scope that performance improvements are often unreachable. Generally, multipathing adds signaling overhead and in certain conditions may in fact decrease throughput due to packet arrival disorder. At the transport layer, the most promising protocol is Multipath TCP (MPTCP), a backward compatible TCP extension allowing to balance the load on several TCP subflows, ideally following different physical paths, to maximize connection throughput. Current implementations create a full mesh between hosts IPs, which can be suboptimal. For situation when at least one end-point network is multihomed, we propose to enhance its subflow creation mechanism so that MPTCP creates an adequate number of subflows considering the underlying path diversity offered by an IP-in-IP mapping protocol, the Location/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP). We defined and implemented a cross-layer cooperation module between MPTCP and LISP, leading to an improved version of MPTCP we name Augmented MPTCP (A-MPTCP). We evaluated A-MPTCP for a realistic Cloud access use-case scenario involving one multi-homed data-center. Results from a large-scale test bed show us that A-MPTCP can halve the transfer times with the simple addition of one additional LIS-Penabled MPTCP subflow, hence showing promising performance for Cloud communications between multi-homed users and multihomed data-centers.

Nowadays, the rapid growth of Cloud computing services is stressing the network communication infrastructure in terms of resiliency and programmability. This evolution reveals missing blocks of the current Internet Protocol architecture, in particular in terms of virtual machine mobility management for addressing and locator-identifier mapping. In this paper, we propose some changes to the Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) to cope this gap. We define novel control-plane functions and evaluate them exhaustively in the worldwide public LISP testbed, involving four LISP sites distant from a few hundred kilometers to many thousands kilometers. Our results show that we can guarantee service downtime upon virtual machine migration lower than the second across Asian and European LISP sites, and down to 300 ms within Europe. We discuss how much our approach outperforms standard LISP and triangular routing approaches in terms of service downtime as a function of datacenter-datacenter and client-datacenter distances.

Among many options to tackle scalability issues of the current Internet routing architecture, the Locator Identity Separation Protocol (LISP) seems to be a feasible and effective one. LISP brings renewed scale and flexibility to the network, enabling advanced mobility management, with acceptable scalability and security. This paper gives a brief presentation about an open control-plane implementation of LISP currently working in the lisp4.net testbed. Our implementation includes most LISP control-plane functions, and also a module to allow the integration with an OpenLISP data-plane and, therefore, the deployment of a complete standalone Open-Source LISP Tunnel Router interoperable with existing Cisco LISP implementation.

Nowadays, the rapid growth of Cloud computing services is starting to overload the network communication infrastructures. This evolution reveals missing blocks of the current Internet Protocol architecture, in particular in terms of addressing and locator-identifier mapping control-plane. In this paper, we give a short overview of a solution that handles virtual-machines migration over the Internet based on the Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol, object of a technical demonstration.