Zichuan Xu
Professor Supervisor of Doctorate Candidates Supervisor of Master's Candidates
Gender:Male
Alma Mater:澳大利亚国立大学
Degree:Doctoral Degree
School/Department:软件学院、国际信息与软件学院
Discipline:Software Engineering
Business Address:开发区校区综合楼
Contact Information:0411-62274514
E-Mail:z.xu@dlut.edu.cn
Hits:
Indexed by:期刊论文
Date of Publication:2018-06-01
Journal:IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NETWORK AND SERVICE MANAGEMENT
Included Journals:SCIE
Volume:15
Issue:2
Page Number:732-745
ISSN No.:1932-4537
Key Words:Policy-aware unicasting; operational cost minimization; online algorithms; service chains; software defined networks; network function virtualization; algorithm design and analysis
Abstract:Data transfer in contemporary networks usually is associated with strict policy enforcement for data transfer security and system performance purposes. Such a policy is represented by a service chain consisting of a sequence of network functions such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems, transcoders, etc. Due to the high cost and inflexibility of managing hardware-based network functions, network function virtualization (NFV) has emerged as a promising technology to meet the stringent requirement imposed on the service chain of each data transfer request in a low-cost and flexible way. In this paper, we study policy-aware unicast request admissions with and without end-to-end delay constraints in a software defined network. We aim to minimize the operational cost of admitting a single request in terms of both computing resource consumption for implementing the NFVs in the service chain and bandwidth resource consumption for routing its data traffic, or maximize the network throughput for a sequence of requests without the knowledge of future request arrivals. We first formulate four novel optimization problems and provide a generic optimization framework for the problems. We then develop efficient algorithms for the admission of a single NFV-enabled request with and without the end-to-end delay constraint, where NFV-enabled requests are defined as the requests with policy enforcement requirements. We also devise online algorithms with a guaranteed performance for dynamic admissions of requests without the knowledge of future arrivals. In particular, we provide the very first online algorithm with a provable competitive ratio for the problem without the end-to-end delay requirement. We finally evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms through experimental simulations. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithms are promising and outperform existing heuristics.
Currently I am a Professor at Dalian University of Technology. I obtained my PhD degree from Australian National University (ANU), and my PhD thesis is entitled "Cost-Aware Resource Allocation and Provisioning in Cloud Networks". Before joining ANU, I received my Bachelor and Master degree from Dalian University of Technology in China in 2008 and 2011. I was a Research Associate at University College London (UCL) from 2016 to 2017. Website: https://zichuanxu.com/