A Novel Approach Towards Sustainable Testbeds: ToMaTo on CloudLab

Although testbeds and experimental facilities are accepted as tools for research in the scope of distributed systems research, such as Future Internet Research, they lack sustainability; once established as a project, they must be maintained and renewed every few years. However, unfortunately, due to an absence of long-term funding for operating/maintenance and reinvestment, a lot of these are terminated just after the project is complete.In this paper, we describe a software-defined testbed on demand; this is based on the Topology Management Tool (ToMaTo), a software environment which was developed within the G-Lab project. ToMaTo, initially designed to run on the G-Lab infrastructure, is now independent of the underlying infrastructure and can be deployed on any Cloud infrastructure on demand. We describe here the deployment of ToMaTo to the CloudLab infrastructure offered by the NSF-funded CloudLab project.This approach offers a new method for sustainable testbeds where neither upfront investment nor the recurring and operating/maintenance costs for the infrastructure will burden the budgets of the projects.

Providing Information Centricity in Today’s Internet via Software-Defined Networking and In-Network Processing

The Internet is a successful network that connects people all over the world. However, it has some fundamental architectural problems which require application developers and service providers to spend a tremendous effort in combating these. Examples for these efforts are content delivery networks or mobile TCP. Thus, it can be said that the Internet is currently not fulfilling the requirements on the global network anymore. The Internet of the future, or its replacement, must solve these problems.There are multiple clean-slate approaches for information-centric networking. However, they are inherently incompatible to the Internet or applications building on it.This work presents a novel resource transport protocol that is optimized for detection by software-defined networks and may be re-routed to in-network processors. Furthermore, it is shown how this protocol can be used to support concepts of ICN even in today’s Internet. Moreover, the resource format that is used in this work is independent from the underlying network, resulting in possible reuse in other networks as well. Applications and protocols building on this resource format can thus easily be re-used in clean-slate networks like NDN.

Reporting mittels Kennzahlen zur Gewährleistung der Qualität und Unterstützung des IT-Controllings eines modernen, wissenschaftlichen Rechenzentrums – ein Praxisbericht

In diesem Artikel wird ein vom IT Center der RWTH Aachen University entwickeltes und in der Praxis bewährtes Reporting-Tool vorgestellt, welches das IT Center in seinem IT-Controlling nachhaltig unterstützt und zur Gewährleistung und Steigerung der Qualität seiner angebotenen Dienste beiträgt. Wir bedienen uns dabei gängigen Methoden aus dem IT Service Management und zeigen auf, wie wir diese für unsere Zwecke anwenden. Neben der technischen Umsetzung gehen wir noch auf das Thema Kennzahlen und kennzahlenbasiertes Reporting aus theoretischer Sicht ein und stellen die damit verbundenen Herausforderungen dar.

Level of Assurance Management Automation for Dynamic Identity Federations based on Vectors of Trust

Accessing remote IT services through identity federations (IFs) is based on solid technical protocols such as the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) and OpenID Connect. However, reliable delegated user authentication and authorization also pose organizational challenges regarding the quality management of user data. Level of Assurance (LoA) concepts have been adapted and applied to IFs, but their inhomogeneous proliferation bears the risk of aggravating instead of simplifying the manual work steps. This is increased by the providing IT services for multiple or dynamically set up IFs. This article presents a novel LoA management approach that has been designed for a high degree of automation, adopts the approach for the dynamic metadata exchange by GÉANT-TrustBroker and exemplifies its usage.