Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

The Internet landscape is changing rapidly, from a completely decentralised paradigm where distinct services were offered by different providers in a fully distributed and decentralised way, to a unified ICT environment where data, storage, and processing resources are co-located in the Cloud, and offered alongside connectivity. Although Cloud services and the underlying communication infrastructures are built on top of commodity Internet mechanisms (transport protocols, IP switching, multipath routing, etc.), it becomes apparent that the performance-agnostic and slow-converging operational assumptions of today's data communications are challenged by the new unified technological and business model. Massive overprovisioning of fully distributed resources that are managed in distinct and often long timescales (e.g., traffic aggregates over backbone networks) is not sustainable in an environment where connectivity and system resources need to be managed by a single unified ICT provider over a centralised infrastructure and in very short timescales. Cloud providers need to maximise return-on-investment from their infrastructures through rapid provisioning and elastic resource management, offering predictable services while operating at higher utilisation thresholds. In order to achieve these goals, in this project we will design and develop an always-on Instrumentation, Measurement, and Control (IMC) framework that will dynamically and adaptively provision unified resources in a unified manner and in short timescales. Evidence has shown that distinct control loops typically employed to manage different resources in different timescales can themselves constitute factors of performance degradation over unified Cloud environments. For example, network-agnostic placement and migration of virtual machines can itself cause congestion in the underlying Data Centre topology. We will therefore revisit the one-dimensional, static or pseudo-random control loops that are typically employed over Cloud topologies, and develop an adaptive closed-loop system that will manage both server and network resources synergistically, in short timescales and based on temporal topology-wide performance. In doing so, we will exploit often controversial concepts such as non-shortest path routing for increasing load balancing while meeting flow completion deadlines, and network-aware dynamic virtual machine migration, to demonstrate the feasibility and also the benefits of combinatorial resource provisioning in achieving global performance optimisation and in increasing the usable capacity of future networks and services. One of the key aims of the proposed research is to investigate and to demonstrate the applicability of measurement-based processes to control and to admit resources in a unified manner and at appropriate, short timescales. Through the necessary system and network node instrumentation, we will devise a logically-centralised measurement and control closed-loop architecture that will be an integral part of the underlying infrastructure's data forwarding operation. The long-term impact of such endeavour will be to revisit the currently disjoint data and control planes in packet communications, and to transform next generation networked infrastructures from performance-agnostic to adaptive and self-managed, through synergy across the different layers and planes of the architecture. The proposed research will be carried out at the University of Glasgow, and experiments will be conducted over a purpose-built programmable Cloud services testbed infrastructure, partly supported by EPSRC's first grant scheme and partly through a generous contribution from the host institution. The research will be conducted in close collaboration with Onyx Group, Microsoft Research and JANET(UK).

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

The ever-increasing demand in traffic and diversity of services, along with the growing complexity and heterogeneity of the infrastructure supporting their provision is presenting an important challenge to current approaches to the management of communication networks. In particular, it becomes increasingly difficult for network management systems to keep a complete and tractable picture of the state of computing/network resources and running services, and their interdependencies, which in turn makes it difficult to achieve optimal performance. This proposal aims to transform the way ICT networks are being conceptualised for management, by developing a data-driven characterisation of emerging dependencies between ICT components inspired by recent neuroscientific paradigms used to study the brain and allowing to capture and act upon the functional impact of complex and changing interactions across layers and processes. By releasing network operators from human intervention and/or manual application of domain expertise, this research paves the way for the development of automated processes that can scale up to the size, heterogeneity and complexity of future ICT infrastructures.

Resilience is a vital property of communications systems and unified ICT environments, and is achieved mainly by infrastructural redundancy, and static security and network control (e.g., through multipath routing protocols, signature-based intrusion detection systems). This results in mostly monolithic solutions that are service and location-specific, and they protect the infrastructure against a static and well-defined set of threats. However, current approaches do not incorporate, nor do they take advantage of, the wealth of spatio-temporal information available in today's ICT environments, such as sensing, logs, packet data, or external global media feeds. Such diverse data and information sources from heterogeneous environments unified over ICT infrastructures can be exploited to create situation awareness, and can help protect the infrastructure from a range of dynamic and emerging adversarial events (e.g., from new types of failures due to complexity and centralisation, to denial of service attacks and natural disasters) that current static approaches fail to provide [1][2][3]. At the same time, today's ICT environments are evolving as crucial, mission-critical socio-economic systems, and their optimal performance depends on adaptive and intelligent schemes to ensure resilient operation at the onset of legitimate or malicious adversarial events. In order to realise this aim, there needs to be a suitable instrumentation, measurement, analysis, and control infrastructure that will operate natively with, and add intelligence to, the unified networked environment. In this project, we propose to design and develop a generic, resilient and adaptive situation-aware information infrastructure that would predict and confront the broad range of challenges faced by the network. We aim to provide novel and practical mechanisms that will enable a deeper understanding of the dynamic and non-stationary evolution of mission-critical systems through harnessing 'big data' sets of relevant internal (monitored) and external (global media feeds) spatio-temporal information - what we call 'context'. Our mechanisms will be incorporated as a protocol suite within a Software-Defined architecture, integrated as a native component in (future) computer networks design. This project is not simply aiming at integrating off-the-shelf solutions into a unified scheme, but rather to revisit the resilience challenge in mission-critical ICT environments and contribute new solutions to the information processing, algorithmic, networking and systems aspects of such undertakings. The research will be carried out over two years jointly at the Universities of Lancaster and Glasgow, involving investigators with a wide range of expertise (from resilient and autonomic communications, through network instrumentation and management, to information retrieval) and in collaboration with a number of leading industrial partners in the areas of safety-critical systems (NATS), industrial control networks (EADS-IW), and hardware-accelerated custom computation products (Solarflare). This consortium will ensure delivery of excellent research results with direct industrial applicability and transformative effects on future intelligent mission-critical infrastructures. [1]. Windows Azure service interruption: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2012/08/02/root-cause-analysis-for-recent-windows-azure-service-interruption-in-western-europe.aspx [2]. Air Traffic Management system malfunction at Dublin Airport: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9110319/Dublin_Airport_radar_system_brought_down_by_faulty_network_card [3]. Power outage hits London Data Centre: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/10/data_centre_power_cut/