Provisioning, Enforcing, and Pricing Temporal Service Differentiation in Virtualized Networked Environments

The project focused on problems and technologies aimed at improving support for service differentiation and efficient use of resources in the cloud. It had a number of targets, including: i) improving the network stack in virtualized systems such as Xen (Xen is an open-source hypervisor that is widely used, including until recently by Amazon); and (ii) developing a scalable, real-time messaging system in supports of micros-services and serverless computing. The project’s scope spanned both system-level efforts and more analytically focused investigations, in particular in the use of pricing in support of service differentiation.

Contributors

• Roch Guerin (WashU)
• Chenyang Lu (WashU)
• Chris Gill (WashU)
• Chong Li (WashU)
• Jiayi Song (WashU)
• Jiangnan Liu (WashU)
• Junjie Liu (WashU)

Publications

• C. Wang, C. Gill, and C. Lu, “Adaptive Real-Time Reliable Edge Computing for Industrial Internet-of-Things Systems.” Proc. IEEE/ACM Fifth International Conference on Internet-of-Things Design and Implementation (IoTDI), April 2020, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
• J. Song and R. Guerin, “Pricing (and Bidding) Strategies for Delay Differentiated Cloud Services.” ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation (TEAC), Vol. 8, Issue 2, Article 8, May 2020.
• C. Li, J. Liu, C. Lu, R. Guerin, and C.D. Gill, “Impact of Distributed Rate Limiting on Load Distribution in a Latency-sensitive Messaging Service.” Proc. IEEE CLOUD Conference, September 2021 (held virtually).
• A. Chakrabarti, R. Guerin, C. Lu, and J. Liu “Real-Time Edge Classification: Optimal Offloading under Token Bucket Constraints.” Proc. 2021 ACM/IEEE Symposium on Edge Computing (SEC), San Jose, CA, December 2021.
• C. Li, Sisu Xi, Chenyang Lu, Roch Guerin, Christopher D. Gill, “Virtualization-Aware Traffic Control for Soft Real-Time Network Traffic on Xen.”.
  Accepted for publication in the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

Software

• Virtualization-Aware Traffic Control (VATC) for Soft Real-Time Network Traffic on Xen: The VATC software is available at https://github.com/Chong-Li/VATC.git.
• A scalable real-time messaging system (SRTM) for cloud services: The SRTM software is available at https://github.com/Chong-Li/SRTM.git.