אירועים והרצאות בפקולטה למדעי המחשב ע"ש הנרי ומרילין טאוב

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is a new networking paradigm where network functions are executed on commodity servers located in small cloud nodes distributed across the network, and where software defined mechanisms are used to control the network flows. This paradigm is a major turning point in the evolution of networking, and it introduces high expectations for enhanced economical network services, as well as major technical challenges. In this talk we address one of the main technical challenges in this domain: the actual placement of the virtual functions within the physical network. This placement has a critical impact on the performance of the network, as well as on its reliability and operation cost. We perform a thorough study of the NFV location problem, show that it introduces a new type of optimization problems, and provide near optimal approximation algorithms guaranteeing a placement with theoretically proven performance. The performance of the solution is evaluated with respect to two measures: the distance cost between the clients and the virtual functions by which they are served, as well as the setup costs of these functions. Our main result is bicriteria solutions reaching constant approximation factors with respect to the overall performance, and violating the capacity constraints of the networking infrastructure by only a constant factor as well.

Joint work with Rami Cohen, Liane Lewin-Eytan, and Danny Raz.

Bio:
Seffi Naor received his Ph.D. in computer science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was a post-doc at the University of Southern California and Stanford University. He is currently a professor of computer science at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, where he has been on the faculty since 1991. Seffi Naor's research interests span a wide spectrum of topics in the design and analysis of efficient algorithms, in particular approximation algorithms for NP-Hard algorithms and on-line algorithms, network algorithmics, algorithmic game theory, and randomization. He is a frequent visiting scientist at Industrial research labs, in particular, Microsoft Research, Bell Labs, and IBM T. J. Watson. During 1998-2000 he was a member of the technical staff at Bell Labs, and during 2005-2007 he was a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research. Seffi Naor has published over 100 papers in top professional journals and conferences. He is currently on the editorial board of Algorithmica and TALG, and he has been on the program committee of numerous conferences. He has won several awards including the Bergman award, 2007 Pat Goldberg Memorial best paper award given by IBM Research, and the FOCS 2011 best paper award