Wenrui Ma

Florida International University School of Computing and Information Sciences

Lecture Information:
  • April 14, 2016
  • 4:00 PM
  • ECS: 349

Speaker Bio

Wenrui Ma is a PhD candidate in the School of Computing and Information Sciences at FIU under the supervision of Dr. Deng Pan. She joined FIU in Spring 2013. She received a B.S degree in Computer Science from Zhengzhou university in 2007. She also has approximately five years industry experience from China Mobile Communications Corporation. Currently, her research interests are mainly in Software Defined Networking and Quality of Service.

Description

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) enables flexible deployment of middleboxes as Virtual Machines (VMs) running on general hardware. Different types of middleboxes have the potential to either increase or decrease the volume of processed traffic. In this proposal, we investigate the traffic changing effects of middleboxes, and study efficient deployment of NFV middleboxes in Software-Defined Networks (SDNs). We first formulate the Traffic-Aware Middlebox Placement (TAMP) problem as a graph optimization problem, and then show that it is NP-hard when there are multiple flows to consider. Next, by observing that in reality flows arrive one at a time, we leverage the SDN central control mechanism, and propose an optimal solution for the TAMP problem with a single flow. We develop the solution in two steps. First, when the flow path has been determined, we present the Least-First-Greatest-Last (LFGL) rule to place middleboxes. Second, we integrate the LFGL rule with widest-path routing to propose the LFGL based MinMax routing algorithm. Further, we have implemented the proposed algorithm as a module running on top of the Floodlight SDN controller, and conducted experiments in the Mininet emulation system. The experiment results fully demonstrate the superiority of our algorithm over other benchmark solutions.