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The new reality of the coronavirus lockdown has prohibited the students' physical presence in laboratories. Administrators, teachers, and students had to think of new alternatives to hold meetings by adopting a virtual format through the development of rapidly available and broadly accessible online resources. Online Open Educational Resources (OERs) can be used in the form of cloud applications to virtualize computers or other physical sciences laboratories, which are necessary for the realization of the objectives of the courses. OERs can efficiently and effectively prepare students to be able to practice their skills. In parallel, OERs offer a degree of flexibility to the teachers, as they allow them to manage information in multiple ways and at the same time accommodate the presentation of knowledge from multiple perspectives. In this article, we propose the use of computer network simulation software as a teaching method in the form of OERs. In this context, we support the teaching of the administrative perspective of a computer network management course utilizing OERs. We explore the effectiveness of the network simulation software Packet Tracer anywhere in online learning of both synchronous and asynchronous education environments. In particular, we examine its suitability and usability in light of group activities at the level of higher education. We investigate its functionality and the teaching benefits that arise through collaborative learning scenarios in a computer lab suitable for the course of network management. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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This article presents a report on APNOMS 2021, which was held on September 8–10, 2021 in Tainan, Taiwan. The theme of APNOMS 2021 was "Networking Data and Intelligent Management in the Post-COVID19 Era.”. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.
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In the last years, the world has faced a lot of significant challenges, like the COVID pandemic, or the Russo-Ukrainian War. Among others, both of them indicated that one has to focus on energy efficiency, because the energy prices have skyrocketed. Computer networks are part of our everyday life. Software-Defined Networks (SDNs) provide the ability to communicate with and control directly the network nodes and to ensure a more adaptable as well as better performing packet forwarding. These capabilities make possible to respond quickly and efficiently to network events. This article presents some possible solutions for optimizing SDN networks in terms of energy management. Beside doing a survey on four known methods the authors also present a novel heuristic solution called Modified Heuristic Algorithm for Energy Saving (MHAES). The new method is compared to another heuristic method and to the case of not applying any energy saving measures using simulations with three different topologies. The results show that both heuristic approaches provided significant energy savings and above a request number threshold MHAES clearly outperformed the previous heuristic method. © 2022 IEEE.
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The COVID-19 outbreak has impacted network operators and data centers in terms of congestion and high traffic that lead to outages and significant pressure on the network. The overhead traffic is generated from web, voice calls, and Internet activity. In this paper, we are investigating data center congestion control for Software Defined Networks (SDN) network data centers. A Software-Defined (SDN) data center is an emerging networking paradigm that simplifies the network architecture by decentralizing plane functionality into a single with centralized decision capabilities. Along with the SDN paradigm, there is a crucial part that is responsible for forwarding packet called OpenFlow switching engine. In a typical SDN environment, the rules are initiated by the SDN controller and pushed to the OpenFlow switches. The traditional OpenFlow switch has no forwarding decision and depends on the incoming policies from the controller’s southbound interface. Additionally, the flow of traffic is initiated from different sources that are assigned to a specific route. However, this significant flow of traffic due to COVID-19 can lead to congestion and degradation of network performance in terms of delay and interruption. To be precise, a single OpenFlow switch could receive a capacity of traffic that floods its forwarding table and lead to link flaps and outages. In order to optimize the OpenFlow switch with regards to how much traffic it can host and to adjust routing capabilities for dynamic changes in the network, we propose an optimized OpenFlow congestion control and fault prediction framework for inbound traffic to overcome the inefficient route planning in the network. The proposed developed optimization algorithm is based on Genetic Evolutionary Algorithm criteria and adds intelligence to the OpenFlow switch by the adoption of Fuzzy Logic prediction capabilities. The experimental evaluation shows that the proposed optimization method adds significant intelligence and optimization to OpenFlow operation. The testbed was implemented experimentally using Raspberry Pi (RPI)cluster with customized SDN and OpenFlow deployment. The probability of the best fitness was 14.11% for Gen 999. The proposed approach adds intelligence and prediction into the OpenFlow switch to overcome the unstable flows of traffic and to predict faults to enhance the traffic capacity levels and manage flows into an entirely uninterrupted production environment. © 2022 IEEE.
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During the last years, huge efforts have been conducted to reduce the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector energy consumption due to its impact on the carbon footprint, in particular, the one coming from networking equipment. Although the irruption of programmable and softwarized networks has opened new perspectives to improve the energy-efficient solutions already defined for traditional IP networks, the centralized control of the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm entails an increase in the time required to compute a change in the network configuration and the corresponding actions to be carried out (e.g., installing/removing rules, putting links to sleep, etc.). In this paper, a Machine Learning solution based on Logistic Regression is proposed to predict energy-efficient network configurations in SDN. This solution does not require executing optimal or heuristic solutions at the SDN controller, which otherwise would result in higher computation times. Experimental results over a realistic network topology show that our solution is able to predict network configurations with a high feasibility (>95%), hence improving the energy savings achieved by a benchmark heuristic based on Genetic Algorithms. Moreover, the time required for computation is reduced by a factor of more than 500,000 times.
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Recently, video streaming services consumption has grown massively and is foreseen to increase even more in the future. The tremendous traffic usage has negatively impacted the network’s quality of service due to network congestion and end-to-end customers’ satisfaction represented by the quality of experience, especially during evening peak hours. This paper introduces an intelligent multimedia framework that aims to optimise the network’s quality of service and users’ quality of experience by taking into account the integration of Software-Defined Networking and Reinforcement Learning, which enables exploring, learning, and exploiting potential paths for video streaming flows. Moreover, an objective study was conducted to assess video streaming for various realistic network environments and under low and high traffic loads to obtain two quality of experience metrics;video multimethod assessment fusion and structural similarity index measure. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed solution strategy, which demonstrated better viewing quality by achieving better customers’ quality of experience, higher throughput and lower data loss compared with the currently existing solutions.
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Official statistics indicate that internet users all around the world watch more videos and play more games during the COVID-19 pandemic than at any time [18]. This unprecedented, challenging situation demands solutions to accommodate rapid growth while maintaining and/or enhancing the video quality. This paper proposes SODA-Stream, an SDN-based optimization framework for enhancing Quality-of-Experience (QoE) in DASH streaming. The optimization framework max-imizes the number of concurrent streaming sessions that can be accommodated in a network and maximize streaming quality. The practical implementation of the framework utilizes the dynamic routing and bandwidth allocation enabled by Software Defined Networking (SDN). The evaluation results show that SODA-Stream significantly outperforms the conventional network routing and resource allocation algorithms, accepting 52% more sessions, 45% improvement in bandwidth allocation, and 70% reduction in bandwidth wastage, smoother playback, and better viewing experience. © 2022 IEEE.
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DDoS attacks are noticed from last many years but due to growing figure of such attacks in present time increases the awareness of them. Many researchers proposed useful detection and mitigation methods for such DDoS attacks. DDoS attack is somewhat simple to perform, hard to safeguard against, and the aggressor is once in a while followed back. The assailant dispatches a DDoS assault utilizing a botnet to produce immense measure of traffic against a casualty's web worker. The casualty might be a business association, government, or basic framework. The wellspring of the attack can be any gadget associated with the web. During the last one and half year of covid-19 pandemic, the exponential growth of about 542% for such attacks is noticed. As all the organizations started working online, the security solutions that provide a safe and secure online working environment are required more. Software-Defined Networks solution is the better option for such requirements. It is a stage towards the foundation of a dynamic and unified nature of the organization. In this paper, we have reviewed that challenges and solutions for SDN networks. The study reveals important detection and mit-igation methods and strategies against DDoS attacks. © 2021 IEEE.
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Networking technologies are fast evolving to support the request for ubiquitous Internet access that is becoming a fundamental need for the modern and inclusive society, with a dramatic speed-up caused by the COVID-19 emergency. Such evolution needs the development of networks into disaggregated and programmable systems according to the software-defined networking (SDN) paradigm. Wavelength-division multiplexed (WDM) optical transmission and networking is expanding as physical layer technology from core and metro networks to 5G x-hauling and inter- and intra-data-center connections requiring the application of the SDN paradigm at the optical layer based on the WDM optical data transport virtualization. We present the fundamental principles of the open-source project Gaussian Noise in Python (GNPy) for the optical transport virtualization in modeling the WDM optical transmission for open and disaggregated networking. GNPy approximates transparent lightpaths as additive white and Gaussian noise channels and can be used as a vendor-agnostic digital twin for open network planning and management. The quality-of-transmission degradation of each network element is independently modeled to allow disaggregated network management. We describe the GNPy models for fiber propagation, optical amplifiers, and reconfigurable add/drop multiplexers together with modeling of coherent transceivers from the back-to-back characterization. We address the use of GNPy as a vendor-agnostic design and planning tool and as physical layer virtualization in software-defined optical networking.
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Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a technology where the programmability paradigm is applied and its study is very important in the training of future telecommunications specialists to understand other emerging technologies such as 5G, IoT and SD-WAN. In the new normal, generated by COVID-19, university students will return to data networking laboratories in a semi-presential scenario. Having a network monitoring system (NMS) application that shows in a complete way, in real time and open to new requirements, the scenarios that are implemented, is important for the training of future telecommunications specialists. In the present research work, the proposed monitoring system makes use of non-relational database, OpenDayLight as SDN controller and an architecture that uses a server that asynchronously displays the results on a client with the use of NeXt-UI. Our contribution is to have a system that allows a better visualization of the SDN scenarios developed and that facilitates students to make improvements to understand the operation of these SDN networks. © 2022 IEEE.
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Service Function Chaining (SFC) is an emerging paradigm aiming to provide flexible service deployment, lifecycle management, and scaling in a micro-service architecture. SFC is defined as a logically connected list of ordered Service Functions (SFs) that require high availability to maintain user experience. The SFC protection mechanism is one way to ensure high availability, and it is achieved by proactively deploying backup SFs and installing backup paths in the network. Recent studies focused on ensuring the availability of backup SFs, but overlooked SFC unavailability due to network failures. This paper extends our previous work to propose a Hybrid Protection mechanism for SFC (HP-SFC) that divides SFC into segments and combines the merits of local and global failure recovery approaches to define an installation policy for backup paths. A novel labeling technique labels SFs instead of SFC, and they are stacked as per the order of SFs in a particular SFC before being inserted into a packet header for traffic steering through segment routing. The emulation results showed that HP-SFC recovered SFC from failure within 20–25 ms depending on the topology and reduced backup paths’ flow entries by at least 8.9% and 64.5% at most. Moreover, the results confirmed that the segmentation approach made HP-SFC less susceptible to changes in network topology than other protection schemes.
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Since World Health Organization (WHO) has declared the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) a global pandemic, the world has changed. All life’s fields and daily habits have moved to adapt to this new situation. According to WHO, the probability of such virus pandemics in the future is high, and recommends preparing for worse situations. To this end, this work provides a framework for monitoring, tracking, and fighting COVID-19 and future pandemics. The proposed framework deploys unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), e.g.;quadcopter and drone, integrated with artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) to monitor and fight COVID-19. It consists of two main systems;AI/IoT for COVID-19 monitoring and drone-based IoT system for sterilizing. The two systems are integrated with the IoT paradigm and the developed algorithms are implemented on distributed fog units connected to the IoT network and controlled by software-defined networking (SDN). The proposed work is built based on a thermal camera mounted in a face-shield, or on a helmet that can be used by people during pandemics. The detected images, thermal images, are processed by the developed AI algorithm that is built based on the convolutional neural network (CNN). The drone system can be called, by the IoT system connected to the helmet, once infected cases are detected. The drone is used for sterilizing the area that contains multiple infected people. The proposed framework employs a single centralized SDN controller to control the network operations. The developed system is experimentally evaluated, and the results are introduced. Results indicate that the developed framework provides a novel, efficient scheme for monitoring and fighting COVID-19 and other future pandemics. © 2022 Tech Science Press. All rights reserved.
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Within the current global context, the coronavirus pandemic has led to an unprecedented surge in the Internet traffic, with most of the traffic represented by video. The improved wired and guided network infrastructure along with the emerging 5G networks enables the provisioning of increased bandwidth support while the virtualization introduced by the integration of Software Defined Networks (SDN) enables traffic management and remote orchestration of networking devices. However, the popularity and variety of multimedia-rich applications along with the increased number of users has led to an ever increasing pressure that these multimedia-rich content applications are placing on the underlying networks. Consequently, a simple increase in the system capacity will not be enough and an intelligent traffic management solution is required to enable the Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning. In this context, this paper proposes a Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based framework within a multimedia-based SDN environment, that decides on the most suitable routing algorithm to be applied on the QoS-based traffic flows to improve QoS provisioning. The proposed RL-based solution was implemented and evaluated using an experimental setup under a realistic SDN environment and compared against other state-of-the-art solutions from the literature in terms of throughput, packet loss, latency, peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and mean opinion score (MOS). The proposed RL-based framework finds the best trade-off between QoS vs. Quality of User Experience (QoE) when compared to other state-of-the-art approaches.
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The novel coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) infection has altered the society, economy, and entire healthcare system. Whilst this pandemic has presented the healthcare system with unprecedented challenges, it has rapidly promoted the adoption of telemedicine to deliver healthcare at a distance. Telemedicine is the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for collecting, organizing, storing, retrieving, and exchanging medical information. But it is faced with the limitations of conventional IP-based protocols which makes it challenging to provide Quality of Service (QoS) for telemedicine due to issues arising from network congestion. Likewise, medical professionals adopting telemedicine are affected with low QoS during health consultations with outpatients due to increased internet usage. Therefore, this study proposes a Software-Defined Networking (SDN) based telemedicine architecture to provide QoS during telemedicine health consultations. This study utilizes secondary data from existing research works in the literature to provide a roadmap for the application of SDN to improve QoS in telemedicine during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings from this study present a practical approach for applying SDN in telemedicine to provide appropriate bandwidth and facilitate real time transmission of medical data.