Goal of the course is to provide students with knowledge on and insight in:
- The architectural and networking aspects of clouds and cloud services;
- Cloud management, i.e., how clouds can be deployed and managed in a cost efficient way while providing the required service levels to the cloud users;
- Security aspects of clouds and cloud services;
- How users can optimally benefit from cloud services.
In addition, the setup of the course (see below) aims at further developing the students’ research skills and independent working, including also critically reading and understanding scientific publications (in the area of Cloud Networking).
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Cloud Networking
The course Cloud Networking replaces the previous course “Core Networks” (191211710). Clouds and cloud services play a crucial role in more and more domains (smart cities, smart mobility and logistics, Industry 4.0, services hosting, data centers, etc.). Large-scale deployment and usage of cloud services, however, brings along big challenges regarding networking, architectures and management of cloud infrastructures and services, as well as challenges regarding security. Therefore, since several years, a lot of research is going on in these areas. The new course will provide in-depth insight in the challenges and proposed solutions and approaches, where the focus will be on the management issues. Important topics regarding the management of cloud infrastructures and services are, amongst others, resource allocation, scheduling and capacity management; traffic characterization and measurement; QoS provisioning and service reliability; service monitoring and measurement; autonomous service control; energy consumption. Regarding cloud architectures and networking aspects important topics are, e.g., cloud federation, mobile edge/fog computing (in the context of loT and emerging 5G mobile networks), and cloud service composition and orchestration. Cloud security covers aspects like confidentiality, data integrity, availability and auditability.
Overall organization of the course Main setup and guidance
- Lecture 1: general introduction to Cloud Networking, by one of the lecturers.
- Lectures 2—6: plenary discussion of 10 selected topics/papers concerning the topics mentioned above; 2 papers per lecture (45 minute per topic/paper). Discussions are guided by one of the lecturers.
- In the remaining time of the quarter, the students define and carry out ‘mini research projects’ related to one of the topics of the selected papers. Groups are guided by the lecturers (one (fixed) lecturer per group), who are available for at least one hour per week for each assigned group.
- We also plan to have a guest speaker from industry.
Remarks
- The final paper selection will be determined shortly before the first lecture; for the general introduction a number of recently published state-of-the-art survey papers will be used.
- The first six lectures will be scheduled over a period of three weeks, in order to have sufficient time available for carrying out the research projects in the remaining 7 weeks of the quarter.
- The research projects will be carried out in small groups or individually, depending on the total number of participants.
- The total number of participants will be limited to 18 students.
Assessment
- Written exam on the topics addressed in lectures 1--6 (40%)
- Outcome + presentation of the research projects (60%)
- Overall grade is the appropriately weighted average, where both parts as such need to be graded higher than 5.5.
Required previous knowledge
Students are expected to have a Bachelor's degree and need to have:
- Basic knowledge in probability and statistics, as typically taught in introduction courses on probability theory, so that they can compute expected values, variances, etc.
- Basic understanding of layered communication protocols/systems, as taught in e.g. the module Network Systems.
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