Cloud networking and communications

Cloud computing is having an important impact on communication networks, both fixed and mobile, stimulating intensive research and standardization of new network architectures, protocols and resource management mechanisms. In the literature, significant attention has been devoted to system aspects of Cloud computing. More recently, however, the focus is shifting towards Cloud networking and communications with evolutionary and revolutionary propositions. The goal is to offer stronger interworking and interoperability between system and network elements. With the proliferation of Cloud offerings, new networking and communication challenges have also emerged. For instance, Data-centers are becoming containers of virtual provider networks, whose embedding can be optimized as a function of cost, customer demands, energy, dynamic scaling, Quality-of-Service (QoS) and Quality-of-Experience (QoE). Users access to Clouds can be subjected to provider level filtering and shaping, functions implementable in novel network middle-boxes based on Cloud Service Level Agreements (C-SLA). Cloud computing has an increasing impact on mobile access networks as well. In particular, network offloading protocols and advanced service migration and caching techniques are being leveraged to offload cellular provider networks and improve user QoE. Efficient resource management in data center and Cloud networks is an open research challenge that needs to be addressed in order to provide bandwidth guarantees and performance isolation. This is particularly important with the increasing reliance on bandwidth-demanding Virtual Machine (VM) migrations for resource consolidation and energy management within data centers and across geographically distributed data centers. In general, Cloud applications and their requirements are evolving so fast that new problems are faced by the telecommunica-tion and Cloud providers every day asking for novel networking and communication architectures, protocols and resource management mechanisms. This special issue presents recent research in the area of communications and networking in the Cloud. Over sixty papers were submitted for this special issue. After extensive review and discussion, twelve papers were selected for publication. The selected papers address four critical topics that play central role in Cloud communications and networking: Cloud network architectures and protocols, Cloud resource allocation and management, and Cloud application deployment and provisioning. Three papers in the special issue address Cloud network architectures and protocols. In ''Cloud-integrated WOBAN: an offloading-enabled architecture for service-oriented access networks'', Reaz et al. [1] propose the design of CIW; an access network that integrates a Cloud with a wireless-optical broadband access network (WOBAN). CIW is designed to create an infrastructure platform to provide different Cloud services from within …