Microservices and containers have transformed the way applications are developed, tested, deployed, scaled, and managed. Several container orchestration platforms, like Kubernetes, have emerged, streamlining container management at scale and providing enter­prise-grade support for application modernization. Driven by application, compliance, and end-user requirements, companies opt to deploy multiple Kubernetes clusters across public and private clouds. However, deploying applications in multi-cluster environments presents distinct challenges, especially managing the communication between the microservices spread across clusters. Traditionally, custom configurations, like VPNs or firewall rules, were required to connect such complex setups of clusters spanning the public cloud and on-premise infrastructure. This industry paper presents a comprehensive analysis of network performance characteristics for three popular open-source multi-cluster networking solutions (namely, Skupper, Submariner, and Istio), addressing the challenges of microservices connectivity across clusters. We evaluate key factors such as latency, throughput, and resource utilization using established tools and benchmarks, offering valuable insights for organizations aiming to optimize the network performance of their multi-cluster deployments. Our experiments revealed that each solution involves unique trade-offs in performance and resource efficiency: Submariner offers low latency and consistency, Istio excels in throughput with moderate resource consumption, and Skupper stands out for its ease of configuration while maintaining balanced performance.

Mininet is a great prototyping tool which can automatically set up and configure customized OpenFlow testbeds scaling up to hundreds of nodes. This work presents the mini-nfv framework for NFV Orchestration, a general purpose VNF Manager to deploy and operate virtual Network Functions and Network Services on Mininet using standardized TOSCA NFV templates based on ETSI MANO Architectural Framework. Its goal is to alleviate the developers tedious task of setting up a whole service chaining environment and let them focus on their own work (e.g., developing a particular VNF, prototyping, implementing an orchestration algorithm or a customized traffic steering). By using mini-nfv, and its OASIS TOSCA NVF profile template it is also intended to bring some level of agility, standardization, reproducibility and replicability to the NFV experimentation world, easing the transition from emulated to real world experimentation.

Mobility support is a requirement in next generation networks. The entity Title Architecture (ETArch) is a clean-slate network architecture that uses a naming and addressing scheme based on the Title and has a natural match with Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm. ETArch aims at satisfying applications requirements such as mobility. On a previous work, we demonstrated the use of ETArch in order to keep ongoing sessions during handover with no packet loss. The initial approach however, performed the handover without taking into account QoS guarantees during the selection of new Point of Attachments (PoAs). This work proposes an extension to the legacy ETArch Mobility Manager, called Quality-oriented Mobility Management Approach (QoMMA), to support a quality-oriented handover management. This extension enables a network-initiated mobility control that improves resources allocation and execute a quality-oriented access point selection. The QoMMA also performs a mobility load balancing in order to maximize admissions of mobile sessions in conditions of congestion. The evaluations were carried out on a testbed that considered real events, and provided evidence that the proposal outperforms legacy ETArch mobility control functionalities.

The eHealth technology will change the way the health system is handled, mainly in developing countries, such as Brazil, where there is a huge shortage of healthcare professionals to assist the patients, especially for those living in rural and remote areas. The Context-Aware Mobile Approach (CAMA) seeks to improve the Brazilian primary healthcare system through context-aware eHealth facilities, such as people mobility, expecting to change the way that healthcare services are applied, managed, and maintained to achieve efficiency and safety for both patients and hospital staffs. Since this type of technology will handle vital parameters of people, it is mandatory that the involved network infrastructure can provide dependability and reliability so it can fulfill their role properly. This paper presents a network infrastructure based on the Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm to enable quality-oriented mobility control capabilities in the CAMA approach, to deploy mobility prediction, Point of Attachment (PoA) decision and handover setup meeting both application quality requirements and current wireless quality conditions, then improving the dependability and reliability of the eHealth biofeedback systems.

The emergence of new technologies, in addition with the popularization of mobile devices and wireless communication systems, demands a variety of requirements that current Internet is not able to comply adequately. In this scenario, the innovative information-centric Entity Title Architecture (ETArch), a Future Internet (FI) clean slate approach, was design to efficiently cope with the increasing demand of beyond-IP networking services. Nevertheless, despite all ETArch capabilities, it was not projected with reliable networking functions, which limits its operability in mobile multimedia networking, and will seriously restrict its scope in Future Internet scenarios. Therefore, our work extends ETArch mobility control with advanced quality-oriented mobility functions, to deploy mobility prediction, Point of Attachment (PoA) decision and handover setup meeting both session quality requirements of active session flows and current wireless quality conditions of neighbouring PoA candidates. The effectiveness of the proposed additions were confirmed through a preliminary evaluation carried out by MATLAB, in which we have considered distinct applications scenario, and showed that they were able to outperform the most relevant alternative solutions in terms of performance and quality of service.

Envisioning to meet the expectations arising from the Future Internet, and specifically to provide efficient Quality of Service (QoS) support for multimedia multi-user sessions, the attempts by the research community have resulted in mechanisms such as Multi-User Aggregated Resource Allocation (MARA). The MARA mechanism adopts an over-provisioning centric strategy to control surplus class-based bandwidth reservations and aggregate IP multicast trees, which allows to significantly improve network performance through a signaling-constrained approach. The results of MARA have been promising, mainly because it drastically reduces signaling and processing overhead. Although MARA has emerged as a promising QoS control mechanism, it was designed exclusively for single-ingress scenarios, thus restricting it's applicability in today's and future networks that mostly adopt multi-ingress capabilities. Therefore, this paper proposes the Multi-User Aggregated Resource Allocation - Multi Ingress (MARA-MI), whose main extension can be found in a new architecture that is able to correlate aggregate IP multicast trees and to assist the adaptation of the over-reservation patterns in multi-ingress scenarios without the possibility of QoS violations and waste of resources occurrence. The overcoming of the main limitations of previous MARA, confirmed by results, qualifies MARA-MI as a promising tool for todays and future IP-based network systems.

Mobile users are increasingly demanding multimedia content created specifically or at least tailored to cater for their needs and preferences. The limitations of current Internet challenge a lot the design of such sessions, and require embedding innovations beyond standards to achieve rich networking. In this scope, the Context Casting (C-CAST) project designed a context-sensitive network architecture to support value-added multimedia sessions with Quality of Service (QoS) guaranteed towards multiple users simultaneously, and in their wireless technologies. However, the per-flow driven signalling approach of Legacy C-CAST exponentially increases with the number of flow admissions, which jeopardize the system performance. Thus, this paper proposes the Advanced C-CAST, which re-architects the Legacy C-CAST to support context-driven over-provisioning of per-class bandwidth and overlay trees. The evaluation of Advanced C-CAST demonstrated its benefits against Legacy C-CAST by significantly optimizing overall signalling load and latency experience.