Workshop Program

Room: Capital suite 11-A

Note: Time schedule has been changed

Session 1: Keynote and Virtual Resource Management
Time Talk/Presentation Author(s)
08:30-09:10 Introduction to the Workshop: Ubiquitous Control as the Future for Network Softwarization Artur Hecker; Martina Zitterbart (Workshop Co-Chairs)
09:10-09:40 Decentralized Scalable Dynamic Load Balancing among Virtual Network Slice Instantiations Franco R. Davoli; Roberto Bruschi; Michele Aicardi; Jane Frances Pajo; Paolo Lago
09:40-10:00 Trade-offs in Dynamic Resource Allocation in Network Function Virtualization Stefan Schneider; Sevil Dräxler; Holger Karl
10:00-10:30 Break
Session 2: Software-defined Control Planes
Time Talk/Presentation Author(s)
10:30-11:00 Towards Coreless Wireless Mobile Networks Ahsan Naveed Malik; Xun Xiao; Ramin Khalili; Artur Hecker
11:00-11:30 Towards a Distributed Routing Protocol for In-band Control Channel with Elastic Controller Clusters Polina Holzmann; Artur Hecker; Martina Zitterbart
11:30-12:00 Wireless Control Plane for Software Defined Networks (SDN) in Data Centers Zuneera Umair; Umair Mujtaba Qureshi; Xiaohua Jia

Workshop Overview

For a more complete description see Call for Papers

In networking research and development there is a clear trend toward the creation and provisioning of more flexible network infrastructures. Emerging enabling technologies such as Software-defined Networking, Network Function Virtualization, Service Function Chaining, and the envisioned Network Slicing in 5G networks are evidence for future software-based infrastructures offering such flexibility. Despite the strong recent research interest for these areas, there are still challenges ahead to unfold the full potential of software-based network infrastructures. One aspect is the higher dynamics of such software-defined infrastructures directly related to the promise of flexibility: instead of a rather static and detailed pre-planning of the (mostly) virtual network infrastructure, the infrastructure should be elastic, i.e., enlarge or shrink as needed on-demand. Thus, one can expect that scaling happens on much shorter timescales than considered before (e.g., minutes rather than days).

The current approaches toward software-based network infrastructures are not yet ready to unleash the full power of the software-based paradigm, as it is already used within data centers. Higher adaptivity and elasticity requirements challenge not only control plane mechanisms, but also the achievable quality of control and finally the attainable quality of service. More research is needed in these directions.

In this context, several challenges can be identified:

  • Moving away from infrastructure pre-planning toward really elastic network slices that can handle high dynamics
  • Elasticity of control and management to support elasticity of network slicing
  • Achieving consistent control of all involved slice resources across different resource domains (wireless access, aggregation, core, compute, network, and storage resources)
  • Assessing flexible control plane design alternatives, e.g., in-band control versus separate data plane and control slices
  • Handling aspects of nested SDN control and network virtualization (e.g., running SDN and NFV inside a network slice)
  • Providing reliable tenant access to control plane functions for the virtualized network infrastructure

The workshop will provide a frame to discuss challenges and first research works along this problem space. The workshop chairs and TPC chairs solicit original, unpublished technical papers in the area of (but not limited to):

  • Distributed, autonomous, and self-organizing SDN control and management planes
  • Scaling concepts for elastic network slices
  • Elasticity of control and management to support elasticity of network slicing
  • Virtual network resource scheduling (rather than virtual network embedding schemes)
  • Robust SDN in-band control channels
  • Out-of-VNet-control Interfaces: how to request instantiation, deletion, and runtime changes of a network slice
  • Partitioning and aggregation concepts for control plane resources (e.g., SDN controller, virtualized infrastructure manager, etc.)

The workshop also explicitly welcomes research work in early stages, presenting problem statements and first concepts, e.g., without comprehensive evaluation but preliminary results. Such contributions can be submitted as short papers (3 pages).

Call for Papers PDF Download