Network Function Virtualization (NFV) platforms consume significant energy, introducing high operational costs in edge and data centers. This paper presents a novel framework called GreenNFV that optimizes resource usage for network function chains using deep reinforcement learning. GreenNFV optimizes resource parameters such as CPU sharing ratio, CPU frequency scaling, last-level cache (LLC) allocation, DMA buffer size, and packet batch size. GreenNFV learns the resource scheduling model from the benchmark experiments and takes Service Level Agreements (SLAs) into account to optimize resource usage models based on the different throughput and energy consumption requirements. Our evaluation shows that GreenNFV models achieve high transfer throughput and low energy consumption while satisfying various SLA constraints. Specifically, GreenNFV with Throughput SLA can achieve 4.4× higher throughput and 1.5× better energy efficiency over the baseline settings, whereas GreenNFV with Energy SLA can achieve 3× higher throughput while reducing energy consumption by 50%.

With the proliferation of data movement across the Internet, global data traffic per year has already exceeded the Zettabyte scale. The network infrastructure and end-systems facilitating the vast data movement consume an extensive amount of electricity, measured in terawatt-hours per year. This massive energy footprint costs the world economy billions of dollars partially due to energy consumed at the network end-systems. Although extensive research has been done on managing power consumption within the core networking infrastructure, there is little research on reducing the power consumption at the end-systems during active data transfers. This paper presents a novel cross-layer optimization framework, called Cross-LayerHLA, to minimize energy consumption at the end-systems by applying machine learning techniques to historical transfer logs and extracting the hidden relationships between different parameters affecting both the performance and resource utilization. It utilizes offline analysis to improve online learning and dynamic tuning of application-level and kernel-level parameters with minimal overhead. This approach minimizes end-system energy consumption and maximizes data transfer throughput. Our experimental results show that Cross-LayerHLA outperforms other state-of-the-art solutions in this area.

The amount of data transferred over dedicated and non-dedicated network links has been increasing much faster than the increase in the network capacity. On the other hand, the current data transfer solutions fail to guarantee even the promised achievable transfer throughput. In this article, we propose a novel two-phase dynamic throughput optimization model based on mathematical modeling with offline knowledge discovery/analysis and adaptive online decision making. In the offline analysis, we mine historical transfer logs to perform knowledge discovery about the transfer characteristics. The online phase uses the discovered knowledge from the offline analysis along with the real-time investigation of the network condition to optimize the protocol parameters. As the real-time investigation is expensive and provides partial knowledge about the current network status, our model uses historical knowledge about the network and data characteristics to reduce the real-time investigation overhead while ensuring near-optimal throughput for each transfer. Our novel approach is tested over different networks with different datasets, and it has outperformed its closest competitor by 1.7x and the default case by 5x. It also achieved up to 93 percent accuracy compared to the optimal achievable throughput possible on those networks.

With the emergence of data deluge, the energy footprint of global data movement has surpassed 100 terawatt hours, costing more than 20 billion US dollars to the world economy. During an active data transfer, depending on the number of hops between the source and destination, the networking infrastructure consumes between 10% - 75% of the total energy, and the rest is consumed by the end systems. Even though there has been extensive research on reducing the power consumption at the networking infrastructure, the work focusing on saving energy at the end systems has been limited to the tuning of a few application-level parameters. In this paper, we introduce a novel cross-layer optimization framework which jointly considers application-level and kernel-level parameters to minimize the energy consumption without sacrificing from the transfer throughput. We present three different algorithms which can dynamically tune the CPU frequency level, number of active CPU cores, number of active transfer threads, number of parallel TCP streams, and the level of transfer command pipelining to achieve different user-set goals. Experimental results show that our proposed algorithms outperform the state-of-the-art solutions, achieving up to 80% higher throughput while consuming 48% less energy.

The global data movement over Internet has an estimated energy footprint of 100 terawatt hours per year, costing the world economy billions of dollars. The networking infrastructure together with source and destination nodes involved in the data transfer contribute to overall energy consumption. Although considerable amount of research has rendered power management techniques for the networking infrastructure, there has not been much prior work focusing on energy-aware data transfer solutions for minimizing the power consumed at the end-systems. In this paper, we introduce a novel application-layer solution based on historical analysis and real-time tuning called GreenDataFlow, which aims to achieve high data transfer throughput while keeping the energy consumption at the minimal levels. GreenDataFlow supports service level agreements (SLAs) which give the service providers and the consumers the ability to fine tune their goals and priorities in this optimization process. Our experimental results show that GreenDataFlow outperforms the closest competing state-of-the art solution in this area 50% for energy saving and 2.5× for the achieved end-to-end performance.

Fast, reliable, and efficient data transmission across wide-area networks is a predominant bottleneck for data-intensive cloud applications. This paper introduces OneDataShare, which is designed to eliminate the issues plaguing effective cloud-based data transfers of varying file sizes and across incompatible transfer end-points. The vision of OneDataShare is to achieve high-speed data communication, interoperability between multiple transfer protocols, and accurate estimation of delivery time for advance planning, thereby maximizing user-profit through improved and faster data analysis for business intelligence. The paper elaborates on the desirable features of OneDataShare as a cloud-hosted data transfer scheduling and optimization service, and how it is aligned with the vision of harnessing the power of the cloud and distributed computing. Experimental evaluation and comparison with existing real-life file transfer services show that the transfer throughout achieved by OneDataShare is 6.5 times greater.

The amount of data moved over dedicated and non-dedicated network links increases much faster than the increase in the network capacity, but the current solutions fail to guarantee even the promised achievable transfer throughputs. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic throughput optimization model based on mathematical modeling with offline knowledge discovery/analysis and adaptive online decision making. In offline analysis, we mine historical transfer logs to perform knowledge discovery about the transfer characteristics. Online phase uses the discovered knowledge from the offline analysis along with real-time investigation of the network condition to optimize the protocol parameters. As real-time investigation is expensive and provides partial knowledge about the current network status, our model uses historical knowledge about the network and data to reduce the real-time investigation overhead while ensuring near optimal throughput for each transfer. Our novel approach is tested over different networks with different datasets and outperformed its closest competitor by 1.7× and the default case by 5×. It also achieved up to 93% accuracy compared with the optimal achievable throughput possible on those networks.

Cloud Computing helps to provide quality of service to the end users within required time frame. Serving user requests using distributed network of virtualized data centers is a challenging task as response time increases significantly without a proper load balancing strategy. There are many algorithms proposed in the literature to support load balancing in cloud environment. All of them have their merits and demerits. The inherent structure of load balancing is rather imprecise. In this research, we model the imprecise requirements of memory, bandwidth and disk space through the use of fuzzy logic. Then we design and evaluate an efficient dynamic fuzzy load balancing algorithm which could efficiently predict the virtual machine where the next job will be scheduled. We implement a cloud model in simulation environment and compare the result of our novel approach with existing techniques. Simulation results demonstrate that our fuzzy algorithm outperforms other scheduling algorithms with respect to response time, data center processing time, etc.

Vendor selection is a strategic issue in supply chain management for any organization to identify the right supplier. Such selection in most cases is based on the analysis of some specific criteria. Most of the researches so far concentrate on multi-criteria decision-making analysis. Though many approaches have been proposed, analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is the most well known as it can deal with a very complex criteria structure. In AHP, the selected criteria are ranked and organized in a hierarchical order from generic to specific to formulate the problem. Though this order of ranking is acceptably logical, it incurs a huge computational complexity when a large number of alternatives are considered as the selection criteria. Moreover, the AHP may generate wrong selection due to computational error. To address these limitations, a novel model namely vendor selection using fuzzy c-means algorithm and analytic hierarchy process (VFA) is presented in this paper by integrating the fuzzy c-means clustering (FCM) algorithm with analytic hierarchy process (AHP). The outcome of the proposed VFA algorithm is compared with the basic AHP algorithm and VFA outperforms the basic AHP and reduces the computational complexity of AHP by a factor of 7.