Facilitating Adaptive Placement of Management and Control Functions in Converged ICT Systems - Advances in Network-Embedded Management and Applications - page 55

relevant they may significantly reduce the risk of producing computing and
communication bottlenecks. Hierarchical structures, in addition, have the
benefit of improving scalability with little impact on algorithmic logic.
It seems inadvisable to attempt to reconcile M&C approaches by simply
bundling them within a single M&C system, because this would lead to
tremendous complexity and redundancy of functions. It is more appropriate to
conceive a homogeneous approach that allows for different mechanisms to
coexist.
In this paper, we propose a novel architecture for the management and
control of converged ICT systems, which targets at the two dimensions of
distribution and hierarchy. In Sec. 2, we first show how state-of-the-art M&C
frameworks can be characterized along these dimensions in order to illustrate
the lack and need for a homogeneous architectural approach that is able to
unify individual frameworks. In Sec. 3, we introduce a compact architectural
framework that facilitates the coexistence of different M&C paradigms and
the adaptation of M&C function placement over time to keep up with the
dynamics in system convergence. In order to show that the chosen M&C
framework is adequate for practical deployment, we apply it in Sec. 4 to the
scenario of an OpenFlow-enabled data center, in which computing,
networking and virtualization must be considered by management and control.
In the same section, we discuss briefly our simulator prototype and relevant
implementation details and sketch a number of qualitative results in order to
assess the proposed M&C framework. We conclude in Sec. 5 with a summary
and a brief outlook on future work.
2 Related Work
Management and control frameworks in both the literature and deployed
systems are abundant. We therefore focus here on a number of representative
approaches that we present in Fig. 1 in the design space that is formed by the
two dimensions of distribution and hierarchy, based on an extension and
combination of previous classifications in [8], [9], [10], [11], [12]. Each M&C
approach is represented by a shaded rectangle that indicates its approximate
location in the design space and relative to other approaches. The dashed line
indicates a hybridization of approaches, and arrows indicate selected trends in
one or more dimensions.